Shameful
Welllllll, this is appalling.
Here's the video. Sarah Sanders is asked multiple times if she believes the media is the enemy of the people. She refuses each time to respond. (via Yahoo) pic.twitter.com/q9jvKSzl3u
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 2, 2018
Jim Acosta apparently walked out at that point.
I walked out of the end of that briefing because I am totally saddened by what just happened. Sarah Sanders was repeatedly given a chance to say the press is not the enemy and she wouldn't do it. Shameful.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 2, 2018
She’s right about one thing: Trump has made his comments clear. Like all authoritarians, he thinks that unless the press is singing his praises and parroting the party line, it is the enemy and should be suppressed.
That is indeed appalling.
Obviously she feels she can’t contradict her boss. Fine, then she should resign. Going along with “the press is the enemy of the people” should not be an option for any decent person.
The correspondents’ dinner is a rough and tumble affair, and still crying about the mean treatment she got at this point makes her seem thin-skinned and petty. Why did she even go if she can’t take it?
There is not a shred of evidence that Sarah Huckabee Sanders has ever been a morally decent person. I suppose one could imagine that there might have been some stage of innocence in her childhood before the twisted ideological conditioning of her family and environment fully took hold, but nothing in her public life to date suggests that she is anything other than an amoral Republican ideologue. It’s absolutely no surprise to me she continues to work for Trump; there have been very few occasions that reports of have emerged of her having any private misgivings about an administration policy she’s publicly defended. In fact, I only recall one: Sources said she was unhappy about having to defend the child-kidnapping policy, and even then it wasn’t particularly clear whether her objections were actually moral, or whether she just thought the policy was strategically unwise because of the “bad optics.” In all other ways, Huckabee Sanders has been a wholly willing cog in the Trump administration hate machine.
As for her whining, that’s even less surprising. Advocating and carrying out morally reprehensible policies then whining at how unfairly they are being maligned by the press, lamenting “Gosh, how the tone of this debate is dragged down by these insults” moments before and/or after viciously slandering their own opponents, and similar forms of bald-faced hypocrisy have long been the default rhetorical strategy of Republicans. And of course, their voters swallow this nonsense whole, because they are the same people who sincerely believe that white Christians are a persecuted class of persons in this country.