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This was always where this was headed. From the moment the comedian hired to roast the assembled guests of the White House Correspondents let it drop that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was, in fact, a liar, this is where the so-called conservative and journalist "shock" was going to end up.
In a heated appearance on CNN Monday morning, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp voiced harsh criticism for comedian Michelle Wolf after her monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday, concluding that it is not her nor any journalist’s place to call out the President for lying.
“Just present the facts and let the American people if they think someone’s lying,” Schlapp said to CNN’s Alisyn Camerota. “Journalists shouldn’t be the one to say the President or his spokesperson is lying. What that does to 50 percent of the country is make them feel they are not credible to listen to.”
To clarify a few things, Matt Schlapp is the head Conservative Guy who brings us the catastrofudge known as CPAC, the yearly gathering of most of the most-rabid elements of the right and far right. It is a place where conservative cabinet officials, NRA spokescritters, and a president or vice president compete for the attentions of a television crowd by demonizing liberals, women, non-white Americans, Muslims, immigrants, and anyone else who they deem to be an enemy of the movement while, in the rooms they are not so eager to show on television, the true movers and shakers of the movement explain how the United Nations is coming for your children, or the latest theories on how the Muslim faith will overtake us all, or pondering whether something something Obama Jade Helm.
Matt Schlapp presides over a den of lunacy in which every single speaker competes to say the most offensive things about other Americans and, specifically, eagerly stoke the notion that the nation's press is lying about this and that on a daily basis, and so his indignation here is absolutely and entirely feigned.
He is the man who allegedly walked out of Wolf's routine after she had the temerity to criticize Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a fact that not a single person present would have noticed had he not very, very loudly took to Twitter to let his press friends know, before sprinting off to the afterparties. So he is bullshitting, but he is doing so in a way that gives away the game.
The original premise of those upset by Wolf, a group that consists of conservatives who have a political interest in Sarah Huckabee Sanders not being shamed for her outrageous attempts to misinform the public and White House journalists who very specifically need to keep themselves in Sarah Huckabee Sanders's good graces if they expect to ever see or hear themselves on television again, was that Wolf insulted Sanders's "looks" by opining that her eye shadow was made of ground-up lies.
The correction needed, says Schlapp, is to never ever call Sanders a liar, even if she is.
So you can see which part of the bit is the part that really got the man's pants all a-twist. Don't call her a liar, says Schlapp, because ... you'll aggravate the Americans who want to believe her lies. They will not like you. You will make them upset.
It is, of course, very advantageous to a movement devoted to peddling false propaganda about Muslims, immigrants, and everyone else who is not them if the press considers it uncouth or somehow professionally unethical to point out which things are lies and which things are not. It is advantageous to access-driven members of the press to pretend the same thing; you can hardly write your next book about the inner workings of the White House if you do not have fine relations with the denizens of the place, and as Wolf sharply pointed out, multiple members of her audience have been writing those very books. Call Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar, as she very clearly and unequivocally is, and she will not give you tidbits for your books. Protect Sarah Huckabee Sanders from those claims, and you might get three chapters out of her.
The White House press corps did the same for Sean Spicer. No matter how much the man lied or how obvious the propagandizing, it was the journalists of the White House press that gave him the most deference. Even as he became a national laughingstock in every other venue, they insisted he was a good man in a bad spot; even as he pushed new lies seeking to blur the lines between objective fact and whatever his autocratic master imagined to instead be true, press briefings were the safest place in America for him to tell such lies, the one place where he could be almost certain nobody would object. That is the difference between those whose careers depend on access to the powerful and those that do not, and that is why the White House Correspondents Association, specifically, fell over themselves attempting to distance themselves from Wolf’s truth-telling.
It would be very good for the personal ambitions of nearly every one of Sarah Huckabee Sanders's defenders if it were seen as uncouth for journalists to point out when a figure of great public importance was, in fact, lying. It would be very, very good for propagandists if the notion stuck that propaganda and truth were interchangeable, in a public setting, and that propaganda should be left unchecked by those that know better so that it may flow unimpeded to all those who might not.
But the people offering such proposals are terrible people who seek to do damage to democracy itself for their own personal gain. They are malevolent. They are selfish at best, and evil at worst. We are allowed to say it; we may even be obligated to do so. They would have us accept them as equal and dignified voices; failing that, they demand we ignore them while they peddle their lies, all in the name of a sociopathic vision of morality in which they are allowed to do everything, and we, nothing.
Bullshit to all of that. Those that protect propaganda are themselves partners in it. If anyone seeks to stand by Sarah Huckabee Sanders as she lies, openly, to the American people each day, they are welcome to line up with her and say so. And we, along with every jester and social critic in America still worth their salt, are free to single them out for scorn as well.
The alternative is a loss of democracy itself. It is the path of propaganda-fueled autocracy, a premise that does not keep Matt Schlapp or his allies up at night, but which should haunt anyone who still pretends to give a damn. So no, we should certainly continue to point out that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is, along with her boss, a prolific liar. She should be shunned. She should be mocked. In a better world, she would be fired.
Being a liar is still a bad thing, whether that chaps Matt Schlapp’s hide or not. And since he runs an entire convention dedicated to demonizing his movement’s opponents with hate speech and lies, he can get well and truly bent for laughably pretending to give a damn here.