HORIST: Trump speaks and Democrats PREspond

That is not a typo in the headline.  What else can you call it when Democrats appeared all over the allied media programs giving the same comments that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave as a response — AND they gave it ahead of time.

The PREsponse

The #NeverTrump media spent the 24 hours prior to the speech analyzing what they conjectured and theorized – what they call news – would be said.  The spent inordinate time on arguing that the Trump does not have the power to declare an emergency in this case because in their OPINION what is happening at the border is not a crisis, emergency or anything more than just the normal course of business at the border.  From their description, you would think it is nothing more than the arrival of tourist buses filled with visiting nuns.

Of course, this did not get handled in the official Democrats response because Trump did not declare a state of emergency.  AND … even as the media panels of parroting pundits were hammering Trump for his “plan” to declare an emergency to be able to access funds for border security, White House officials were telling the press that the President had no intention of using that executive power at this time.  This did not stop the false reporting on CNN and MSNBC.  Hell!  It didn’t even slow it down.

The PREsponse had two primary thrusts.  The President would have nothing new to say, and his address would just be a recitation of what they have interpreted, determined and peddled as past lies.  In many cases, however, the media is lying about many those alleged lies.  As primarily partisan propaganda outlets, CNN and especially MSNBC are in constant deception mode.

They refuted what they expected to be Trump’s main argument – terrorists, criminals and drugs crossing the border.  All are untrue.  So sayeth the gods of the media oracle.  They noted that most illegals have come here legally and overstayed their visas – as if that has anything to do with the border issues.  That being true does not make the concerns over the virtually open border untrue.  If most robbers were to access one’s house by the back door and fewer by the front door, do you leave the front door wide open based on that fact?  Both issues need to be addressed.

It should come as no surprise that the PREsponse was totally predictive of the official Democrat REsponse.  So, how did it all go down?

The President’s address

Trump did what he had to do – and not much more. He opened by initially shifting the conversation away from the more contentious criminality issues to the humanitarian issue.  He called our porous border a human crisis – first focusing on those attempting to gain entry illegally.   He did offer up important statistics on the gross number of heinous crimes committed by illegal aliens – with examples following later in his remarks.

Trump offered up a litany of specific statistics – and they passed the fact checkers, except for a couple of peripheral and irrelevant comments.  Those were seized upon by the left-wing media to broad-brush Trump’s entire address as a pack of lies – as they pre-emptively declared as their intention in their PREsponses.  Only FOX News aired and responded to the more important statistics.  CNN and MSNBC committed the sin of omission – as usual.

Trump also clearly defined his border security concept.  It would not be a great 2000-mile brick and cement wall has been used as a straw man to be shot down by the biased media.  It never was.  Several times during the campaign, Trump had spoken of using different concepts (technologies) at different places.  He said it a number of times during his presidency.  These past statements are ignored by the media because they refute the false narratives – the propaganda.

Now that Trump has made it clear on national television – and based on their own intentional past misreporting – the anti-Trump media declared that he has just now abandoned his plan for a great wall. (For the record, more than a year ago, this writer wrote a commentary explaining that “the wall” was a metaphor.  Most people understood that — despite the persistence of the media to promulgate the lie.)

In the last portion of his address, Trump gave life to those statistics he had previously reported – citing horrific examples.

In style, Trump was very traditional – sitting at his desk in the Oval Office.  As in all such addresses, the backdrop had significance.  Over his left shoulder where photographs of his parents and over his right were what appeared to be a collection of law enforcement badges.  These were there because they are how he defines himself.  It is noteworthy that in other photos of Trump in the Oval Office, you see the same family photos.  They are not props for the address.

As a political pitcher, Trump came out of the inning having given up no hits, no runs and committed no errors.  It could have been a longer presentation, with a more compelling brief, but it was good enough.

The Democrat Response

That cannot be said for the Chuck and Nancy show that followed.  They squandered their opportunity by sticking to the PREsponse.  It was not a rebuttal of anything Trump said.  Rather they dwelled on the old worn out narratives. They claimed that Trump’s address was riddled with lies – although they did not specifically challenge anything he said.  They proffered the argument that there was no crisis – human or otherwise – even though Democrats have frequently referred in the past to the “crisis” at the border.

They seemed to express their deepest sympathy for the federal workers who are currently furloughed – with little consideration for the victims of crimes  and deadly accidents committed by illegal aliens or even all those people who suffer along this contemporary “trail of tears” promoted by Democrat policies – the enticement of jobs, schooling, healthcare and welfare; the security of sanctuary cities; and the maintenance of a wide open border.

The staging of the Democrat response was … well … a bit bizarre.  Standing side-by-side in a looong hall at a podium that was too narrow, Chuck and Nancy conjured up images of the famous American Gothic painting, that had a grim-faced farmer and wife staring straight ahead, or even worse, of those two scary little girls standing down the hall in The Shining.  It did not take long for self-styled satirists on social media to photoshop the faces of Schumer and Pelosi on both of those iconic images.

That mockable moment depleted a lot of the little that Schumer and Pelosi had to say.

Media Response

For the most part, the left-wing media dutifully read from their PREsponse scripts and the parroting pundits squawk their opinions just as they were trained to do.  The only concession to objectivity between CNN and MSNBC was Chris Cuomo’s summation that neither side had made their strongest cases.  Since the address and response on MSNBC came during the Rachel Maddow time slot, you can easily imagine her response – and the responses of the pundits she empaneled, which consisted of colleagues at MSNBC.

The overview

At the risk of being accused of my own bias, I have to call the winner by a narrow margin to be President Trump.  Though the media may have said there was nothing new and it was all a pack of lies, that was simply not true.  Many Americans got to see and hear the President outside the media filter, so a lot of his information was new to them.  He had specifics while Schumer and Pelosi had old talking points.

If you are not a political groupie or addicted to cable news, you would have heard some scary statistics from the President and political generalities from the Democrats.  Those who did not watch both presentations, and only tune in to MSNBC, will likely think the Democrats crushed Trump, but most folks are smart and more objective.  Those are the ones that Trump may have picked up.

So, there ‘tis.