The real danger
Ah Devin Nunes – the lying weasel who will commit any outrage to try to save his darling Don.
…last week, the California Republican was credibly accused of leaking texts from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member to Fox News as part of an unusually misguided partisan stunt.
Patriotism at its finest.
Slate added last week that Nunes’ greatest hits include “being forced to admit that he hasn’t personally read the court documents that he based an FBI–Hillary conspiracy memo on, being forced to admit that the FBI actually did disclose the information about Trump ‘dossier’ author Christopher Steele that Nunes had accused it of not disclosing, and being forced to admit that he had coordinated his statements about the phony Obama ‘wiretapping’ story with the White House and then lied about it.”
Lying weasel, lying in the service of an even worse lying weasel. Let us now praise famous men.
One of the nation’s exercises in democracy can be found on late-night TV. Hosts crack sharply critical jokes about the country’s politicians without fear of retribution from said politicians.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sees that exercise very differently. He told Fox News Channel that a skit Stephen Colbert did mocking Nunes’s memo alleging FBI bias in the Russia investigation is a danger to the country.
Isn’t that funny now – here’s me thinking the danger to the country is Representative Devin Nunes lying and leaking a senator’s texts to Fox News, when really it’s a late night talk show host mocking said Devin Nunes.
Nunes’s “danger” comment makes more sense when viewed through an authoritarian lens — that free speech can somehow undermine government that has been functioning for nearly 250 years.
Nunes’s allies in the White House have increasingly decided to see the world through the lens of authoritarianism. Instead of rebutting their critics, White House officials have resorted, a number of times, to saying it’s irresponsible to criticize the president and his staff. One of the most egregious examples came in October when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it would be “highly inappropriate” for journalists to fact-check Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, because he’s a general.
If all else fails I guess they could just poison us.
So a House Committee Chair thinks it’s dangerous to criticize elected officials, the White House insists that its Chief of Staff and all generals are beyond criticism, and the President’s lawyers are obtaining purported prior restraint gag orders from private judges without notice or hearing?
Time for the NY Times to run a bunch more op-eds from its conservative hacks claiming that free speech is under threat… from liberal college students.