The Zealots Who Cried ‘Big Foot’

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

We all remember the young shepherd’s credibility deficit in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Nonetheless, today, Democrats and media allies are engaged in the same adolescent behavior, but with a difference: Wolves are real; the "menace" about which the left is shouting is more fable — like the Sasquatch. Everyone believes in wolves, but few take Big-Foot seriously. Media and Democrats struggling to assuage their 2016 election embarrassment by metaphorically shouting "Big-Foot" are shredding their meager residual credibility, because only Sasquatch-believers buy their repetitious hyperbole.

The progressive/Democrat/media coalition which never imagined Donald Trump winning has become unhinged by Trump’s presidency. Media-fueled Trump derangement is unprecedented — even compared to their vicious attacks on Barack Obama’s predecessor – and it’s undermining more serious criticism of Trump. Their neurotic hysteria has become so misleading, constant and trivial that most people have stopped looking for legitimate reporting and tuned media out. If everything is "scandalous," then nothing is.

President Trump’s nominations and initial executive orders are winning praise from reluctant Trump voters and reuniting Republicans, while Trump has elevated politically-impotent liberals’ outrage-alert level to DEFCON 1 simply by fulfilling the promises on which he ran and won.

A perfect example is Trump’s publicly-popular, commonsense executive order pausing Middle-Eastern refugees. An activist judge’s weak temporary restraining order and a notoriously liberal Appeals Court ruling aside, honest observers know that Trump’s action is authorized by existing law: a 120-day delay on all refugees, an indefinite delay on Syrians and a 90-day hold on travel from seven known terrorist breeding-grounds listed as "nations of concern" by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s order is nearly identical to one issued in 2011. Then, media commended Obama’s six month ban on Iraqi refugees, but, since Trump declared a shorter 120 day refugee suspension, the media have exploded in faux-indignation, broadcasting sorrowful anecdotes about a relative handful of inconvenienced aliens.

Trump invoked the same law, the same Obama DHS policy and the prior administration’s seven countries, none of which have properly-functioning governments, to suspend admissions for half or less the duration of Obama’s suspension. Unaffected majority-Muslim countries understand and support Trump’s order. Yet, rather than crediting Trump’s effort to tighten security against terrorist infiltrators, media misrepresented his order as "anti-Muslim." In other words, they manufactured a scandal where there was none – at least not when a liberal Democrat set the precedent.

The supreme irony is that the same Democrats and media allies who tell us America cannot be the world’s policeman, who approved of Obama’s precipitous troop withdrawals from Iraq and downplayed his foreign policy blunders in Syria, Libya and Iran now say that America has a moral obligation to risk security by welcoming poorly- or un-vetted refugees from a violence-prone region unsettled, in large part, by Obama’s fecklessness.

Unsurprisingly, trust in media is at an all-time low.

Other zealots still squander time and money tracking Big-Foot – indeed, cable television perpetuates the Sasquatch legend – but only frenzied political zealots are searching Trump Tower and the White House.

http://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/2017/02/10/zealots-who-cried-big-foot/97740404/