Wednesday, June 12, 2019

RIP VAN ACOSTA

CNN pretentious jackass Jim Acosta, who has a new book coming out wondering where the hell his damned Congressional Medal of Honor is, has a warning for conservatives.

Explaining why he wrote his new book, The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, Acosta told Anderson Cooper, "What I wanted to do is sort of take the big-picture view on this and say, 'Is this the kind of country we want to hand off to the next generation, where we’re now comfortable from here on out saying that the press is the enemy of the people?'"

"And to our friends in conservative media, Anderson, I say this: It is no guarantee that you get to stay in power forever," he continued. "And so, another administration could come in and do the very same thing to them and say, 'Well, Donald Trump did it. Guess what, we’re going to do it to you, too.'"

But cut Jimmy some slack.  The poor guy's only recently awakened from an eight-year coma.

If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.
 
Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.
 
Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
 
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

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