OLD AND BUSTED: We Are All Socialist Now.

—The Washington Post, through then subsidiary publication Newsweek, February 16^th, 2009.

The New Hotness? We Are All National Socialist Now:

I’m so old, I can remember the DNC-MSM getting the vapors over imagined “rats” in a Republican campaign ad in 2000: “Democrats smell campaign rat.” Who knew it was merely a case of projection?

In 2015, Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who drew the above image, “published (then unpublished) a disgusting piece depicting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters as toy monkeys and ‘fair game’ since they appeared in a campaign ad, ABC’s Good Morning America ignored the story completely while CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today excused it as merely a ‘feud’ and part of ‘increased scrutiny’ for Cruz as he ascends in the polls.”

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S POSTMODERNISTS: In “The day Trump killed the fact,” the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri displays a rather short — and selective — memory:

It’s Tuesday, March 29, 2016, and facts are dead.

They had a good run.

It used to be that when people said “Who are you going to believe, me, or your own eyes?,” they were joking. Not the Donald Trump campaign. It remains stubbornly impervious to reality.

“But we have video footage of this happening,” you can say. “Look, here it is!”

“Ah,” the Trump campaign says, bending eight spoons and then vanishing into a telephone, “but what if the whole world exists only as a figment of our minds?”

The Trump campaign has been an ongoing test of how few things people are willing to Google.

But long before the rise of Donald Trump’s political career, the Washington Post has also had a casual, elastic relationship with capital-T truth. Let’s take a look at couple of their more recent lapses into postmodernism. In 2010, in response to Richard Armitage being ignored in Fair Game, Sean Penn’s film version of Valerie Plame’s memoirs, Post film critic Ann Hornaday sniffed and responded ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

In Washington, watching fact-based political movies has become a sport all its own, with viewers hyper-alert to mistakes, composite characters or real stories hijacked by political agendas. But what audiences often fail to take into account is that a too-literal allegiance to the facts can sometimes obscure a larger truth.

* * * * * * *

Thus, the movies about Washington that get the right stuff right — or get some stuff wrong but in the right way — become their own form of consensus history. “Follow the money,” then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exercise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.

Hornaday’s article is titled “Washington-set films may fudge facts, but good ones speak to larger truths.”

That same year, Matt Yglesias, then writing columns for the pre–Bezos Post before joining GE-backed Vox.com tweeted:

And there’s that whole Watergate thing and the origins of legendary Post mole “Deep Throat,” aka disgruntled FBI agent Mark Felt, and how he was shielded for decades by the Post.

“As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: ‘In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing,’” Dennis Prager once wrote, and reality has been equally fungible at the Post as well. Having argued in favor of postmodernism for years, and having aggressively defended two presidents in recent memory who lived by that philosophy*, they’ve failed to notice that facts in the MSM in general and the Post specifically died long before Tuesday, March 29, 2016. Perhaps if the Post had defended truth more rigorously when it was abused by administrations that its Democrat operatives with bylines supported, the newspaper would be in a better position to complain when a presidential candidate its staff collectively loathes comes along to make a hash of it.

* To the point where Newsweek, then-owned by the Washington Post spiked its exclusive by Michael Isikoff on Bill Clinton’s oval office dalliance with Monica Lewinsky at the start of 2008, thus inadvertently fueling the meteoric rise of the Drudge Report, and at the start of 2009, perhaps declaring its own obituary before being offloaded soon after by the Post a $1.00, famously declared “We Are All Socialists Now” on its cover.

Related flashback: Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes depicts children of Hispanic presidential candidate as monkeys.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: That Deleted Ted Cruz Cartoon Wasn’t The Worst Thing Wash Post Published This Week. Try this on for size: “The war in Afghanistan follows Obama to his vacation in Hawaii.” “To be honest, I find this sort of headline and lede more indicative of media bias than anything any cartoonist can ever did. This is how you write a story about six dead Americans in a war that is supposed to be over already? No, this is more like reporting as ideological Vulcan mind-meld: How did the biggest single day of KIAs ruin Obama’s vacation?”

RACISM STRAIGHT UP: Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes depicts children of Hispanic presidential candidate as monkeys:

Commenting on Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters appearing in a campaign ad on Saturday, Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes created a disgusting GIF early Tuesday evening depicting Cruz’s young daughters as toy monkeys being played with and arguing that “[t]hey are fair game.”

In attempting to explain her arguably racist GIF, Telnaes argued that because daughters Caroline and Catherine appeared in a humorous Christmas-themed ad, they have decided “to indulge in grown-up activities” and allowed their father to play them “as political props.”

Here’s the cartoon:

“Tell me, if Obama’s daughters were, hypothetically, in his most famous campaign ad, the 30 minute ad he ran on most networks on the eve of the 2008 election, would they be ‘fair game’ too?”, Ace asks, noting that at about the twenty minute mark, “You know what I see there? ‘Fair game,’ according to the Washington Post. That’s what I see there.”

As  T. Becket Adams adds at the Washington Examiner, “In 2014, an obscure GOP Hill staffer was forced to resign from her job after a Facebook post criticizing President Obama’s daughters, Sasha and Malia, went viral on social media:”

Outside of social media, Lauten’s comments also created a media firestorm, and even led the networks one evening in December.

“It is one of the few rules that the news media and the mob usually both adhere to: Leave families out of the fight. However, tonight a Republican staffer is out of a job after something she wrote on social media about the first daughters,” then-NBC News anchor Brian Williams said on Dec. 1, 2014.

Spokespersons for the Post did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

Not to mention, the Washington Post’s staffers twisted themselves into knots in 2006 to depict George Allen’s impromptu response to his omnipresent Mohawk-coiffed Democrat video tracker as a racist slur — and then proceeded to run an estimated 100 stories on Allen’s “racism” from mid-August to election day to simultaneously swing the race to his opponent, hand the Senate to the Democrats, and knock out a leading 2008 GOP presidential candidate. But hey, the Post’s excuse for practicing racism towards Republicans and their kids? Eh — “fair game.”

Noted.

UPDATE: “‘You slimeballs’: Why won’t Politico tell the truth about the disgusting Cruz cartoon?”

To ask the question is to answer it.

MORE: Post editor pulls Telnaes’ cartoon, but not before more damage was done to the Post brand and to Telnaes’ reputation.

RELATED: Here’s the ad by Cruz Telnaes attacked, which debuted this past weekend on Saturday Night Live — and now has over 1.5 million views on YouTube:

And here’s Cruz’s response to the slur by Telnaes and the Post:

Indeed.™ Marco Rubio also condemns the Post’s racist hit on Cruz and his kids.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Elizabeth Lauten quit Monday as communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., after her Facebook criticism of Sasha and Malia Obama sparked a huge media backlash.

“It is one of the few rules that the news media and the mob usually both adhere to: Leave families out of the fight. However, tonight a Republican staffer is out of a job after something she wrote on social media about the first daughters,” NBC News’ Brian Williams said during Monday’s evening newscast.

“CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley” followed suit: “[E]lizabeth Lauten: A congressional aide whose Facebook post about President Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, sparked a firestorm.”

—“Nets instantly jumped on GOP Hill aide story; ignored Gruber flap for days,” the Washington Examiner, December 2nd, 2014.

The morning after Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes published (then unpublished) a disgusting piece depicting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters as toy monkeys and “fair game” since they appeared in a campaign ad, ABC’s Good Morning America ignored the story completely while CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today excused it as merely a “feud” and part of “increased scrutiny” for Cruz as he ascends in the polls.

On CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O’Donnell complained in one of the show’s opening teases that it was Cruz who was “lash[ing] out at a top newspaper over his kids” while chief White House correspondent Major Garrett ruled minutes later that the racist cartoon is part of the territory: “With Cruz’s climb in the polls has come increased scrutiny. This Washington Post editorial cartoon depicting his children as holiday props drew Cruz’s wrath.”

Garrett also made sure to hit Cruz for issuing fundraising e-mails last night concerning the smear: “[B]y late last night, the Cruz campaign were sending out fundraising e-mails asking for emergency contributions. The subject line read: ‘They attacked my children.’”

In the 8:00 p.m. Eastern hour, fill-in co-host Vinita Nair explained that “[Donald] Trump isn’t the only candidate who is bashing the press this morning” as “Ted Cruz is angry with The Washington Post editorial cartoon” that “showed him in a cartoon as an organ grinder, using his daughters as holiday props.”

As many on Twitter have pointed out, it seems as though the liberal media have trotted out their tired strategy of already wondering if a conservative will ‘overreach’ concerning their response to a scandal.

—“ABC Skips WashPost Smear on Cruz Girls; CBS, NBC Excuse It as a ‘Feud,’ Part of ‘Increased Scrutiny,’” NewsBusters, today.

TURNABOUT IS A BITCH: Clinton World stunned by Trump remarks.

Donald Trump’s public mocking of Hillary Clinton has renewed criticisms of crass, sexist comments by the Republican presidential front-runner.

Clinton’s campaign on Tuesday decided against a frontal attack, with communications director Jennifer Palmieri offering inviting others on Twitter to repudiate Trump’s comments.

But behind the scenes, Team Clinton saw the remarks at a Monday rally as a new low, and some allies predicted they would lead to his demise.

“We are watching the Donald melt down,” predicted Ellen Tauscher, the former congresswoman who served as undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs under Clinton.

“His racist, sexist, xenophobic rants are now wearing on people generally,” she said.

“Even the folks caught up in the celebrity culture that thought these performances were funny initially, which is stunning, now realize these comments seem predictable and pathetic,” Tauscher added. “What the Donald seems to miss, as he claims he loves women, is that this is a historic election for women and they are done with the juvenile, prurient, potty talk behavior.”

Other political observers contacted by The Hill weren’t so sure.

Meh, Trump has been “melting down” for months, and yet he keeps leading in the polls. Meanwhile, here’s how the WaPo treats Ted Cruz’s kids — by portraying them as monkeys.

As Ace says, “I like how liberals pretend there’s some rule that justifies going after GOP Presidents’ kids, apart from them being GOP Presidents’ Kids.”