Last week I walked into a restaurant and saw someone who looked to be Joan Walsh being interviewed. I went up to her table and she confirmed she was indeed the ex-MSNBC and current CNN pundit. I told her the former was crazy to fire her and she was off to a great start at the latter. Having done my best ingratiation, we had one of those three minute conversations, giving me the chance to try to “catapult a truth” to a different audience than here and Twitter.
I told her how angry I’ve been by coverage of the so-called FBI “bias” scandal based on the “Lover’s texts” between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page (which of course has been joined by the “Release the Memo” insanity) — same bullshit but with national security risk!
Creation of the “scandal” based on two peoples’ selectively released texts is a textbook study of the ability of the right to create a political tsunami out of nothing. And representing the opposite of what’s almost certainly true.
Yet no one, not even on MSNBC, not even Joy Reid rebutting the execrable Jen Kerns seems to explain the insultingly obvious. Today I saw born-again-never-Trumper and (sadly) MSNBC contributor George Will furrow his brow at how the Strzok/Page texts showed possible bias at the FBI. No one threw him out of the studio, Mika-style.
The FBI budget request for 2017 lists 35,158 employees. Is there a remote chance that more than two out of the remaining 35,156 are pro-Trump? Based on the FBI events of October 28-31, 2016 (Comey letter and false NYT story denying Russian influence on Trump), it would not be a wild guess the pro-Trump texts outnumber the anti-Trump ones exponentially.
And yet, on the TV (and not just on Fox) the “bias” of the FBI is now an article of faith.
I suggested to Joan she started calling this the arrant nonsense it is. No one should be able to make the argument the Strzok-Page texts show anything (At least until a fair sample of the rest of the 35,156 are released.)
See my prior diary: Bias at the FBI: A False Story built on poisonous selective disclosure.