‘Legitimate Political Discourse’ Is Latest Media Hoax

In fact, that isn’t what the resolution said at all. No such declaration exists. That is propaganda, plain and simple, and to watch the nation’s most famous newspaper engage in it is terrifying. But it wasn’t just one paper lying; this Democratic Party talking point was repeated nearly verbatim by dozens of anchors and guests on CNN and MSNBC, plus hundreds of reports in newspapers and journals and on the Internet, all repeating the same utter falsehood – that the RNC had made excuses for the Jan. 6 riot and labeled it “legitimate political discourse.”How do I know it is fake news? Easy. As a journalist with 40 years’ experience, I took the obvious step of reading the resolution for myself. Nowhere does it connect “political discourse” with the Jan. 6 violence. What the Republican National Committee actually did in the resolution was to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger because of their role on the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Select Committee.

“Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” the resolution declared, “and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation [with the Republican Party] to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”

The resolution does not specifically define who is being persecuted by the Jan. 6 committee for engaging in “legitimate political discourse,” but you can bet no one on the Republican National Committee thought it was a reference to rioters smashing windows, assaulting police or desecrating the U.S. Capitol. The RNC later explained that the resolution was a reference to Americans being chased down with subpoenas and threatened with jail time because they had supported President Trump’s attempt to prove election fraud. But the media pundits stuck with their initial claim that the RNC had defended political violence. If reporters were doing their real job instead of carrying water for the Democratic Party, they could have looked up “discourse” in the dictionary and discovered that it refers to “written or spoken communication or debate.” There’s no way to apply that word to the Jan. 6 riot unless you are intentionally misleading the public, but that’s just what countless journalists did.

To put it plainly, what was missing last week in almost all of the media reports was one brave reporter who stared back at Jake Tapper or Martha Raddatz or Joe Scarborough and said, “You know that’s not what the RNC resolution said. They never claimed that the violence on January 6 was legitimate political discourse, so let’s set the record straight.”

That void of media truth-telling was despicable, only rivaled by the spectacle of Republicans rushing in to denounce their party leadership for condemning party disloyalty. This allowed the Trump-hating media to put together clips of the usual suspects – Sens. Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski, among others – pleading with their fellow Republicans to bend a knee and go along with the debasing Democrat agenda. Pathetic.

Read the FULL COLUMN and comment at Real Clear Politics. Follow Frank Miele’s blog at Heartland Diary USA.