JAMES, IT’S AN ELECTION YEAR, YOU DON’T NEED TO NUDGE THE DNC-MSM ALL THAT MUCH: James Carville Suggests Fact-Checkers Abandon ‘Impartial’ Reporting ‘To Help Save Constitution’ From ‘Republicans.’

Democratic strategist James Carville on Thursday suggested that fact-checkers should focus their reporting on “Republicans” to assist in rescuing the U.S. Constitution.

In a June episode of his “Politics War Room” podcast, Carville advocated for media outlets to increase their “slanted” coverage of former President Donald Trump to prevent his reelection, claiming “the entire Constitution is in peril.” Carville reiterated this stance during a Thursday episode, shifting his focus to fact-checkers and expanding his advocacy to include Republicans generally, rather than just Trump.

Flashback to 2004:

An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”

The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”

But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”

“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.

Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.

Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”

In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”

In 2004, that year’s boogieman was dubbed “Bushitler.” Last month, he was rehabilitated, given a new suit, and freed from the bunker by The Hill, which was thrilled to report that his aides were endorsing Kamala Harris.

SOHRAB AHMARI: Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.

Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric, but I use the term advisedly—and literally: How else to describe Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Darryl Cooper? In it, the amateur historian argued that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Nazi death camps were the result not of malice, but a logistical mishap: a failure to plan for the Wehrmacht’s oversupply of POWs. “Nazi Germany,” Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”

Carlson, a journalist I used to admire, hailed Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” and lent him the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter. As Cooper insinuated that unnamed “financiers” leaned on an indebted Winston Churchill to prolong the war, Carlson didn’t bother to ask, To whom, specifically, are you referring, Darryl?—like a curious journalist could be expected to do.

Long before he appeared on Carlson’s show, Cooper had made known his nutty views about the Jews as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich. In July, he declared that the Nazi takeover of France—which resulted in the deportation of 75,000 Jews to concentration and death camps—“was infinitely preferable in virtually every way” than the admittedly offensive drag queen “Last Supper” staged at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.

Two months earlier, Cooper posted a rant on X in which he urged Christians to “reckon” with the fact that “no god in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and bloodthirsty as the Yahweh of the Old Testament”—a rehash, in other words, of Marcionism: a second-century gnostic heresy that posited that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a capricious demon and not the God of Jesus. In 2019, Cooper agreed with an online interlocutor that “non-racist fascist” is a “decent description” of his politics.

As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Cooper has garnered some 26 million views on X, boosted by Elon Musk, who called it “very interesting” and “worth watching.” (He later deleted the post.) The denizens of the Barbarian Right space seem to have gotten what they wished for out of the Cooper interview. “A lot of good points,” said one. “Only thing missing is naming the group behind the majority of subversions.” Another chimed in: “The mass migration into Europe and America is a Jewish-led operation.”

Exit question: Is J.D. Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?

DISPATCHES FROM THE MODERN NFL: Washington Commanders Exec Suspended After Video Rant About ‘Homophobic’ Black Players, ‘Alcoholic Fans.’

That was not all he had to say about NFL players. He branded some of them “dumb as hell,” too.

“There’s obviously a spectrum. There’s some that are dumb as all hell, and there are others that are very smart,” he said. “I think there’s also a real sad but true reality that some start smart, and they get hit in the head so much that they don’t stay smart.”

In another segment of the recordings, Enteen went after the fans, calling many of them “mouth breathers.”

“Most of the NFL fans I would say, are high school educated alcoholics,” he insisted in one segment, while blasting fans for starting fights in the stands in another.

He did not spare the league itself, either.

He called the NFL’s commitments to social justice causes “performative” and only done for publicity, said that the league’s only real goal is to “make as much money as possible,” and even alleged that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is just an empty suit and figurehead and that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is really the man who runs the NFL.

Enteen also said he thinks Jones is a racist. “I think he hates gay people and black people,” he says on the video.

Flashback: A Word to the Wise Liberal. “This is a PSA to all male Democrat staffers: If a really hot chick goes on a few dates with you, there’s a 75% chance that she works for James O’Keefe.”

UPDATE: Commanders executive fired after trashing Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, NFL players and fans in undercover video. “The video was released on Wednesday by the O’Keefe Media Group, which is run by James O’Keefe. He told the Associated Press that the video was recorded back in June in a situation where Enteen thought he was going on a date, but the person he went out with was actually an undercover reporter for O’Keefe Media.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE: 9 Signs You Were The Bad Guy In World War II.

CHOOSE YOUR ADVENTURE:

● Top pollster finds Trump gains momentum against Harris – 58% chance of winning 2024 race.

—The New York Post, today.

● Kamala Harris will win US election, Telegraph poll predicts.

—The London Telegraph, yesterday.

● Trump’s campaign in chaos amid infighting among ‘grifters,’ ‘hucksters’ and ‘profiteers’ on his team.

—The London Daily Mail today.

● Top pollster claims Kamala Harris’ honeymoon period is ‘officially over’ and points to poll that proves it.

—Also the London Daily Mail, also today.

SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald gives the background on Tucker’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper (the basics of which you’ve already read in the Mediaite story I linked to yesterday, and Steve’s piece at the PJ Mothership this morning) and writes, “A newsletter is not the place to ‘debate’ a podcaster over the most written-about subject in human history. Instead, we think it’s better to think about this episode from a political perspective:”

Who benefits from putting a World War II revisionist on the most popular podcast in America two months before an election? Well, for one, Carlson himself. One way to understand the interview is as a play by Carlson to draw a line on the right, with himself and the other brave “truth-tellers” (like Candace Owens) on one side, and the “neocons,” “Zionists,” and other establishment hysterics on the other. Sure, it shrinks the conservative coalition, provokes pointless infighting, and gives ammunition to Democrats and various sub-Lincoln Project grifters who would love nothing more than to distract from nearly a year of donor-funded, pro-terror protests on the left by portraying Donald Trump supporters as a gang of Nazi apologists. But it also puts Trump on the spot: Will you denounce your loyal followers to please liberals and “Conservative, Inc.” talking heads who hate you? Either way, Carlson wins.

Carlson wins, that is, and Trump loses*. As Abigail Shrier observes on X:

Kamala benefits….as does Barack Obama. This is trivially true in the sense that two-party politics are inherently zero-sum, but consider also the specifics of Cooper and Carlson’s discussion of Churchill. The implication isn’t merely that, say, Churchill was an overrated leader or a bad diplomat. Rather, it’s that Churchill was pushed by “Zionist” financiers to drag the United States into a war that it had no business fighting (never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for a war with Germany from the late-1930s on). Those Zionists, always trying to drag naive Americans off to war!

Of course, it’s easy to say this story evokes antisemitic tropes. But what in present-day American politics is it supposed to remind you of?

For help with that one, we can turn to Iranian agent, Obama ally, and Iran-deal salesman Trita Parsi, who felt that yesterday was an excellent time to turn the subtext into text by sharing a clip from Carlson’s previous interview, with Jeffrey Sachs:

Read the whole thing.

Related: We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again.

Carlson also spoke in a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He will be touring his show this month throughout the nation, with scheduled guest appearances in different cities by Vivek Ramaswamy, Charlie Kirk, recent Trump endorser Tulsi Gabbard, and none other than vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance himself.

I hope Vance enjoys answering questions from the media about why he’s joining a man who wants his viewers to give serious consideration to the possibility that the Nazis should have been allowed to invade Poland, liquidate its Jews and Poles, and repopulate it with Germans. (As a follow-up, ask Vance whether he thinks Hitler would have kept a promise not to invade the USSR.) Those questions might not be fair to Vance, but then again he would probably prefer answering those than telling people the truth: He will be there because that is where he thinks Republican voters are right now. And they are not in a good place if Tucker Carlson is their guide.

More: “A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about. Who’s the assignment editor now?”

* QED:

USA! USA! USA! Flagstock 2024: UNC Frat Bros Get the Rager They Deserve.

Well there must be some good reason
Why they didn’t want you there
It was a party, but only for the cool guys
Nobody you know was there
— “It Was a Party,” Dan Reeder

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Journalists don’t get invited to many parties that are actually fun. They always ruin the vibe. This sad truth was reiterated on Monday hours before Flagstock 2024 when a journalist from Politico (the news blog located many, many floors below the Washington Free Beacon) asked party organizer John Noonan about the lack of female artists scheduled to perform. Moments later, once the filthy journos had been escorted to the fenced-off fun exclusion zone where they belong, a group of supremely talented female artists arrived in the VIP tent—courtesy of Hooters, which also provided the catering. Representation matters, after all.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

KAMALA HARRIS’S BANANA REPUBLIC ON FREE SPEECH:

In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”

Is it possible that the History of the 20th Century can be explained by simple reference to a change in prepositions?  That is the gist of the epiphany that struck me while watching David M. Kennedy on Booknotes (C-SPAN).  He and Brian Lamb were discussing the fact that this book is part of the Oxford History of the United States joining James McPherson’s excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988).  Suddenly, the switch from “of Freedom” to “Freedom from”, in the respective titles, struck me as emblematic of the pivotal change of  emphases in the Modern world.  The history of America from Plymouth Rock until the Crash was essentially the story of Man’s struggle for Freedom, but Freedom in a positive sense, Freedom to do things–to worship, to speak, to gather, etc.  Thus, McPherson’s book details the great convulsion of the 19th Century, the Civil War and the struggle to free the slaves–a struggle to expand freedom.  But Kennedy, charting the great 20th Century convulsion,  has it exactly right, the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from “the vicissitudes of life” above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty.  This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.

You may be surprised to see Hoover’s name there, but one of Kennedy’s great contributions in this book is this formal recognition by a liberal historian (joining the great conservative Paul Johnson, see Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) that Hoover, far from being a do-nothing antediluvian, was basically a liberal interventionist, who started us down the path that lead to the New Deal.  (Of course, the great difference here is that Kennedy concludes that this makes Hoover a more laudable figure, while Johnson lambastes him.)  In fact, Kennedy’s reappraisal of Hoover’s activism, coupled with the quotes above, unintentionally leaves the, I believe accurate, impression that the only achievement of the New Deal–the change in focus from government as a guarantor of individual freedom to a  provider of succor in time of want–was not even unique to the New Deal, but was instead a general response to the intractable Depression.

Obama’s imaginary friend Julia and Footie Pajama Boy smile as well.

BRIDGES TOO FAR: Arnhem: The daring plan that ended in disaster. New video from the Imperial War Museum:

While Operation Market Garden was one of the Allies’ biggest failures in WWII Europe, it simply delayed in the inevitable outcome, as Mark Felton explored last year in a video titled “A German Bridge Too Far — The Nijmegen Counter Offensive:”

GOT WOKE, WENT…: Sony’s Ridiculously Woke ‘Concord’ Took Years and $150 Million, Now It’s DOA and the Left Is Screaming.

THEN SHE’S STILL IN FAVOR OF THEM: Kamala Supports Racial Reparations In Resurfaced Videos From Last Run, Has Not Denounced Position.

HEY, IT’S AFTER LABOR DAY. SHOULDN’T THERE BE NEW SHOWS ON, NOT OLD RERUNS? Biden administration to accuse Russia of sustained effort to influence 2024 election.

As Mark Hemingway writes, “Amazing how this comes out the day after a top Democrat is again busted harboring a Chinese spy.”

Good ole Obama-style “Stray Voltage” once again.

GAS PRICES: More decreases at pumps as nine states now have prices under $3 per gallon.

Gas prices fell yet again on Wednesday, continuing the recent trend of decreases at the pumps after the Labor Day weekend.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gas on Wednesday is $3.317, according to AAA. This is a drop from a week ago, when the average price for regular gas was $3.361 per gallon. Of particular note, nine states now have an average price for regular gas below $3 per gallon, the highest total number of states having such a cost in 2024. Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina have gas prices that plummeted to under that threshold.

Gas prices remain an important issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. With President Joe Biden deciding not to seek reelection, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, will have to indicate how she will address the country’s high gas prices and energy costs and how both affect the economy and people’s finances.

While prices have fluctuated in 2024, they have decreased in recent weeks and months. Nevertheless, gas prices remain higher than when former President Donald Trump was in office.

Which ultimately, Kamala believes is a good thing, right? Harris campaign dodges over EV mandate walkback.

Harris’ campaign has sent contradictory signals about her position on a mandate for automakers — a key issue in pivotal Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where many autoworkers are based.

• In a lengthy “fact-check” email last week that covered several issues, a campaign spokesperson included a line saying that Harris “does not support an electric vehicle mandate” — suggesting she changed her previous position, without elaborating.
• On Aug. 28 Axios asked the Harris campaign to clarify her position, and whether she would sign or veto a bill she co-sponsored in 2019 that included such a mandate for manufacturers.
• On Tuesday afternoon, Harris’ campaign ultimately declined to comment.

I’ll take that as a “she still supports her 2019 mandate,” but is declining to say so, since the DNC-MSM is happy not to actually get her on the record on any issue. Besides, she’s the vice president of an administration that has been pushing for higher gas prices since it took office, and is full of Obama retreads who pushed for higher gas prices even before Barry took office.

POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE, POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE: Brian Stelter Returns to Clown Nation News.

What could go wrong?

October, 2020. Brian Stelter does an entire segment on how a fake news story is crafted.

"Manufacturing a storyline." From Russia to TV, by Brian Stelter.

The story that Stelter was calling fake? The Hunter Biden laptop story.😂 pic.twitter.com/f1H1D3sD9o

— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 4, 2024