Fox News host and close Trump pal and confidant Sean Hannity ranted at CNN anchor and Biden-Trump debate moderator Jake Tapper for heinous crimes like — calling out former President Donald Trump’s Nazi-echoing speech?

On Wednesday morning, President Joe Biden took to his campaign Twitter account to answer Trump’s recent declarations he’ll debate Biden “anytime, anywhere” in a video that included a reference to the Stormy Daniels hush money-election interference trial, telling Trump “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.”

Things quickly escalated from there, with Biden offering a June debate on CNN, Trump accepting, and CNN announcing a June 27 date. Not long after that, an ABC News debate for September was agreed upon.

While the selection was widely praised — Tapper was one of my picks in a column that just missed CNN’s debate announcement — not everyone was happy. On Wednesday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Hannity, the host derided the selection of Tapper — and presented as evidence a collection of clips in which Tapper levels criticism at Trump:

Make no mistake, fake Jake Tapper might be a lot of things. He’s no journalist, and like everyone else in the media mob, Tapper spent the last several years obsessively hating all things Donald Trump, even retweeting a comment from a notorious Trump-hater calling Trump, quote, “100% insane.”.

Tapper said the tweet is noteworthy, but that’s not all. You decide.

JAKE TAPPER: As we watch Donald Trump attempt to turn his arrest and indictment into some sort of campaign commercial. The folks in the control room who, I don’t need to see any more of that, this he’s trying to turn this, and he’s trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad. That’s enough of that. We’ve seen it already.

Here he is right now, under under my voice. You hear him repeating his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

President Trump, now in quarantine, has become a symbol of his own failures.

He is running the single most negative, sleazy campaign in American history for a major party candidate.

If you were to open up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non Germans with Germans as poisoning. There’s really no other way to say it. Donald Trump’s language mirrors this directly.

He pushes the government of the United States to use its power and credibility to justify his lies.

SEAN HANNITY: Does that sound like a journalist, or a talk show host with very liberal leanings?

Before we break that down, let’s take a second to consider who we are talking about here.

On the one hand, you have Tapper, an award-winning journalist about whom words like “renowned” and respected” are bandied with the relative frequency of a “Breaking News” banner on cable news. He cut his teeth being a pain in the ass to then-President Barack Obama on the White House beat for ABC News, and pissing off liberals like me.

But among his peers, Tapper’s reputation for fairness has always been ironclad.

When Tapper joined CNN in 2013, he quickly earned a reputation as a dogged interviewer who could be counted on not to take it easy on anyone. Before Trump came along, he was regarded by conservatives as tough but fair, and despite liberal annoyance with Tapper over the years, criticism of him is scant from liberal media watchdog Media Matters.

In fact, Tapper even earned praise from a certain Fox News host back in 2012 when he was interviewed about — presidential debates:

So what happened?

That brings us to Hannity, who is not just an open cheerleader for Trump but a close confidant who, to his mild credit, was texting the White House during the January 6 riot pleading for help dispersing the Trump mob.

Less to his credit, he also sought guidance from Trump’s White House in the aftermath of the riot. The guy is basically an unpaid Trump campaign advisor with privileges, working for a network that settled a 3/4 of a billion-dollar lawsuit related to Trump’s election lies that Hannity helped spread.

Let’s just say that when it comes to critiquing journalism and objectivity, Hannity has what lawyers might call a deficit of standing. Add to that the fact that Trump hasn’t been interviewed by Tapper since the anchor confronted him over his racist attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

Hannity’s likely defense — that he doesn’t pretend to be a journalist — doesn’t change his utter lack of qualification to make these judgments or his obvious incentives to make them poorly.

Having said all of that, let’s look at the crimes Hannity accuses Tapper of. Here’s the context for the lines Hannity singled out:

As we watch Donald Trump attempt to turn his arrest and indictment into some sort of campaign commercial. The folks in the control room who, I don’t need to see any more of that, this he’s trying to turn this, and he’s trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad. That’s enough of that. We’ve seen it already.

Tapper directed the control room to dump out of live non-newsworthy B-roll of Trump mingling with fans at a restaurant after his felony arrest and arraignment — for which Trump literally produced campaign merch.

Here he is right now, under under my voice. You hear him repeating his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

This was Tapper dumping out of Trump’s Iowa victory speech during the “invasion” chunk — after having carried the first ten minutes of the speech, roughly the same as Fox. 

President Trump, now in quarantine, has become a symbol of his own failures.

This was part of a segment on Trump exposing people to Covid like it was his job at the height of the pandemic — and that was before we knew he was infected during his debate with the president. I guess he didn’t have access to any bleach.

He is running the single most negative, sleazy campaign in American history for a major party candidate.

Here’s what Tapper singled out that Hannity cut out: “Trump and his allies in the media and the members of his family and the Trump allied websites and such are leveling with charges so heinous I’m not going to say them, just nonsense, crap, tied into QAnon, tied into pizzagate, tied into the worst things you could say about a person.”

If you were to open up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as poisoning. There’s really no other way to say it. Donald Trump’s language mirrors this directly.

Trump’s repeated Hitler-echoing comments have earned him Hitler-echoing headlines for months — and that was before the news that he literally praised Hitler to his chief of staff.

He pushes the government of the United States to use its power and credibility to justify his lies.

Here’s the rest of the sentence about Trump’s “long record of prevarication”: “he pushes the government of the United States to use its power and credibility to justify his lies about crowd sizes, or hurricane paths, or fake crimes by his political opponents.”

As the kids say, where is the lie? What is “liberal” and “partisan” about calling out Hitler stuff and pedophile lies and hatred for immigrants and using a Sharpie to alter hurricane maps and turning your felony arrest into a campaign stop.

Here’s the thing: I know a lot of people are not going to want to hear this, but I think Sean Hannity is actually a pretty good guy at heart. I’ve met him several times (he says he’s a big fan — I’m not sure I believe that).

He gives off a vibe, like a lot of conservative figures do in person, of someone putting on a pro wrestling kayfabe performance. That’s not just from my personal interactions, but from his unease in those text messages with the January 6 riot. You could extend that to all the other Fox News personalities who privately derided Trump’s election even as they promoted them on the air.

I think Sean Hannity is blinded by a misplaced sense of loyalty to Trump, which has become the litmus test for Republicanism. I don’t think Sean Hannity would defend anyone else in the world who praised Hitler or echoed his vile speech.

It’s time for Hannity to take a good look at himself and ask why he’s doing it now. He’s better than that.

The post Trump Pal Hannity Attacks CNN Anchor Jake Tapper — For Crimes Like Calling Out Trump’s Nazi Stuff first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/dTJD3fs