Dear CCI Friends,
A startling review by Paula Day, a Maine attorney and CCI volunteer.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The Last Handoff
By Paula Day
Immediately before the Biden presidential inauguration, the New York Times Magazine ran an article, “The Last Handoff”–– a review of the Obama/Trump transition, a leap into “uncharted waters,” according to the author.
It was a provocative title that brought to mind the upcoming transition from Trump to Biden, certainly an event less charted than the one before.
Consider the similarities: both the 2016 and 2020 elections were so close that the electoral college votes were critical; the losing sides were so incredulous that each insisted the winning side had somehow rigged the outcome. Clinton acknowledged Trump’s win in 2016, but the Democrats, the FBI, the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Congress and mainstream media spent the next four years discrediting Trump to the point of trying to have him indicted for colluding with Russia. Donald Trump refused to concede and spent two months after the election insisting that he was the legitimate winner.
Had the Times acknowledged these similarities, its readers might have considered “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Surely there can be no benefit to the country in this level of hysterical partisanship.
But a Balanced View was not what the Times had in mind.
It invested thousands of words in white on an ominous black background accompanied by suggestively sinister graphics, rehashing not one but three of the most thoroughly debunked cliches of the last four years: 1) the Russian “hacking” of the DNC emails, 2) the Steele Dossier, and 3) an exhaustive re-telling of the Michael Flynn story.
The only possible reason for the appearance of this January 11 article could be one more attempt to breath life into the cold corpse of Russiagate. No matter how flimsy the accusations against Russia, Russia must remain the enemy by those in power. The article spins mundane facts into deceptive propaganda and we are reminded yet again that “the constant repetition of a lie is far more persuasive than the demonstration of truth.”
Read it and weep.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/11/magazine/trump-obama-presidential-transition.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage.