At 66 and 69, together Howard Fineman and Doris Kearns Goodwin add up to 135 years of white privilege, or just a little younger than Bernie Sanders. Over at the Huffington Post, Fineman attempted to disguise a dull conversation with someone who agrees 100% with him as news. The only news is how utterly obtuse the two of them are.
Although the media has tried on at least 284 occasions to obliterate Donald Trump, these two bubbled provincials are certain The Donald isn’t being vetted.
The focus on conflict rivets attention on the present. And by constantly jabbering about polls and his chances, Trump also throws the focus on the unknowable (but cheap for the media to speculate about) future of the campaign.
“It’s: ‘How is he going to do?,’” said Goodwin. “It’s: ‘How is this happening? Oh my God, he is leading! It’s possible he could win!’”
By dwelling on the glittering present and the entertainingly uncertain future, Trump erases all sense of history, context and accountability for his own life and actions.
“He doesn’t let you have time to go back to his past,” said Goodwin.
Good grief, Goodwin’s and Fineman’s pals in the DC Media have spent 6 months savaging Trump as a racist, sexist, claim-jumping, flip-flopping, bankrupt rapist who’s also a shameless opportunist and liar. Trump’s been (dishonestly) fact-checked within an inch of his life and not a day goes by where an old quote from a past interview or from one of his books isn’t held up to the world for ridicule.
Leftists Fineman and Goodwin are either not paying attention or just can’t bring themselves to process the fact that none of these cheap gotchas are sticking to Trump.
And that’s the real problem with today’s media. It is not that the media is refusing to vet Trump. The problem is how the media vets Trump, and Republicans in general. The public is sick of it, so it just doesn’t stick anymore. No one believes the media, and no one should.
Trump is constantly all over the media beating these liars and gotcha-queens at their own game. The public appears to like and accept his answers. Maybe if the media didn’t treat the vetting process as a game of Cheap Gotcha, they wouldn’t be so easy to beat?
The media has lost all of its credibility, and by extension much of its influence, because it has spent decades operating as an opposition research machine against the GOP, while at the same time playing defense for the likes of a Barack Obama, most especially when it came to vetting Senator AyersWrightPflegerRezko in 2008.
Another part of the reason no one trusts the media anymore is the bubbled, clubby cronyism we see everywhere, which is exactly what this Fineman-Goodwin fiasco is.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC