Tag: north korea
Lou Dobbs Returns To Boost Trump With More North Korean-Style Propaganda

Lou Dobbs Returns To Boost Trump With More North Korean-Style Propaganda

Lou Dobbs, the former Fox Business host known for his obsequious handling of Donald Trump, is back with a new show fronted by uber-election denier Mike Lindell. His Monday premiere, complete with a lengthy interview with the former president, would make an autocrat’s state TV propagandist blush — and it demonstrates exactly what Trump wants to see from coverage of himself.

Dobbs’ full-throated pro-Trump adulation turned the former CNN business journalist into Fox Business’ biggest star during the Trump presidency. Fox News stuffed its lineup with hosts who eagerly debased themselves in exchange for influence over his administration — but no one did it quite like Lou. Dobbs stood apart from the ranks who praised Trump and bitterly denounced his foes, telling viewers that Trump’s White House featured “sunlight beaming throughout the place, and on almost every face” and at one point signing off, “Have a great weekend. The president makes such a thing possible for us all.” As Fox News President Jay Wallace put it, “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Dobbs’ Trump sycophancy ultimately led to his dismissal from Fox — and almost pulled the network down with him. His fervent support after the 2020 election for the least credible election denial conspiracy theories provided plenty of material for the massive defamation lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic against Fox. The apparent scapegoat of Fox’s networkwide irresponsibility, his show was canceled just a day after Smartmatic filed its $2.7 billion suit, which is still pending; Fox settled with Dominion last year for a record $787.5 million.

Now, after three years of solitary podcasting as part of the Fox diaspora of former network hosts, Dobbs has a new gig working for another major player in the election denial world. Lindell, a right-wing pillow magnate whose company is a major Fox advertiser, says he has run out of money to pay the lawyers who were defending him from defamation lawsuits by Dominion and Smartmatic, but he’s still overseeing his far-right Lindell TV streaming channel, which now features Dobbs.

Dobbs kicked off his first episode at Lindell TV with an allusion to his previous employer, promising to carry on the “conversation that was unexpectedly — and, well, in my opinion somewhat rudely — interrupted some three years ago.” He then proceeded into a monologue in which he did precisely that, condemning the “rigged election,” touting Trump’s lead in polls “by huge margins, huge margins that will only grow,” and castigating the “stubbornly anti-Trump” Republicans who refuse to follow him as the “titular head and ideological leader of the Republican Party” — all over on-screen text reading “The Never-Ending Political Persecution of Donald Trump.”

He concluded the monologue by attacking the “Marxist Democratic Party and this corrupt Biden regime who mean to destroy Trump and our constitutional republic and our American way of life,” adding, “That is the context for tonight’s interview.”

“Interview” is too generous a term to describe the taped 40-minute Mar-a-Lago sitdown Dobbs aired. Instead, Dobbs offered Trump fawning praise and denunciations of anyone standing in his way, then invited him to respond. Here’s a sampling:

  • “We’re now in the eighth year of the political prosecution of President Donald J. Trump. You are taking incoming every day from the legal system and the Marxist Dems. Give us a sense of how you feel right now, and what your sense is of this country that will permit such an outrage.”
  • “They’re destroying the country; I think a lot of people have that sense. I know about half the population has that sense. And there are people in this country, a lot of people, good strong, healthy families that are fighting against these policies and their effects on Middle America. You were the president who made the Republican Party the party of the working man and woman in this country, the American family. Give us your sense of what you will do to restore primacy to the forgotten men and women of this country, who right now are fighting for their economic and their real survival.”
  • “Well, I know who does [say they oppose voter ID], and those are the Democrats. And they do for the very reason you are intimating. They cheated in 2020. They cheated in 2022. Those are statements of fact — they’re not — somebody can dispute them, but it’s — the facts are straightforward. And one of the things that I’ve always found interesting is no one wants to say to you, relitigate 2020. The fact is if this country doesn’t come to its senses about how deceitful and crooked these elections are, and I’m talking about from the local to the presidential offices, we’re going to have real problems. What I don’t see from the Republican Party is a response. I don’t see Ronna McDaniel and the [Republican National Committee] going after it. What would you like to see here? I know that you’ve got more than a full plate — you’re being assailed from every corner — but what would you like to see the Republican Party, for which you are the titular head, do?”

After the interview, Dobbs summed things up for his viewers.

“And there is President Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, and most Americans, I believe, think that he would make an excellent choice to be the 47th president as well,” Dobbs said. “You saw his strength, his humor, his focus. This is the reason that most people believe that based on his record, his incredible leadership, and the bond between him and the Republican base, that he will be that 47th president. We certainly hope so. We hope you do as well.”

Fox has a lot of Trump sycophants on the payroll, but the current lineup can’t match Dobbs for sheer shamelessness. Even Sean Hannity doesn’t go that far.

And that’s why the emergence of Fox diaspora players like Dobbs is a problem for the network. Trump wants every reporter and pundit giving him Dobbs-level treatment, and he’s willing to savage Fox and tell his supporters to seek their news elsewhere whenever he feels it isn’t meeting that standard. That pressure will inevitably bring the network ever-closer to him over the course of this presidential election year — even at the risk of more calamitous lawsuits.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong Un

Disarming North Korea May Flummox Biden, Too

Of the many mortifying moments of Donald Trump's presidency, few can match his hopeless infatuation with an unlikely partner: North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong Un. It is still hard to believe that the leader of the free world could stand up in public and tell an audience: "We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters ... We fell in love."

President Joe Biden is meeting Friday with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and Topic 1, as usual, will be that belligerent nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang. Biden's approach to North Korea looks and sounds much different from Trump's. But his results are likely to be more or less identical.

Trump thought he was much shrewder than his predecessors in defusing this nuclear threat. "Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed," he tweeted in 2017. "I won't fail." First, he warned that if the North Koreans threatened the United States, "they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." He tweeted, "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his."

Then, as often happens in romantic tales, two people who start out disliking each other soon went head over heels. In 2018, Kim invited Trump to meet with him, and Trump surprised everyone by accepting. After the first meeting ever between a U.S. president and a North Korean head of state, Trump exulted. "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," which was a charming fantasy.

The two leaders met twice more, amid similarly extravagant claims. Trump's supposed goal was "the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." But by the time he left office, it was obvious that he had naively granted North Korea more time to do what it had been doing all along: building up its nuclear and missile capacities.

Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, had carried out two nuclear tests and 16 missile tests. The son ramped up, conducting four nuclear tests and 91 ballistic missile tests. Experts say North Korea has as many as 60 nuclear weapons and produces enough fissile material to add another dozen each year. Nothing Trump did impeded its progress.

Biden has his own strategy. One official told The Washington Post the administration will pursue a "careful, modulated diplomatic approach, prepared to offer relief for particular steps" with an "ultimate goal of denuclearization." But agreeable adjectives won't dissuade the North Koreans from proceeding with something they believe is vital to their survival.

They believe this because it's true. In 2018, Vice President Mike Pence warned that North Korea "will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn't make a deal." The "Libyan model," you may recall, involved the U.S. and its allies using military force to topple the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, whose gruesome fate was to be captured and killed by rebels.

But Pence chose exactly the wrong analogy. Gadhafi was vulnerable because he had earlier agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program. Had he managed to assemble an atomic arsenal, the U.S. would not have tried to evict him from power. From Libya, Kim can deduce the potential downside of surrendering his nuclear weapons.

It may not be impossible for the U.S. to reach an agreement with North Korea to freeze or reduce the size of its arsenal in exchange for sanctions relief and full diplomatic relations. But even that limited task will be harder for Biden because of Trump's self-defeating policy toward another adversary — Iran.

President Barack Obama had joined with several other major nations in negotiating an agreement in which Iran agreed to give up 98% of its stockpile of uranium, dismantle thousands of centrifuges and accept stringent international inspections — all of which would prevent it from building nuclear weapons. In exchange, the U.S. and its partners consented to lift economic sanctions on Tehran.

But Trump stupidly withdrew from the accord, proving that the U.S. can't be trusted to honor its commitments. Why would Kim reduce or surrender his nuclear deterrent to get an agreement that might end up in a White House shredder? Why would he risk being naked to his enemies, as Gadhafi was?

The specter of a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles has bedeviled one American president after another. Biden, the latest to confront it, won't be the last.

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Donald Trump, James Mattis, Joseph Dunford

Woodward Book Says Mattis Feared Trump Would Start Nuclear War With North Korea

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

The coronavirus bombshells in Bob Woodward's new book, Rage, due out September 15, are so explosive that they have somewhat overshadowed other important parts of the book — for example, the veteran journalist/author's reporting on President Donald Trump's foreign policy decisions. And Woodward, according to the Guardian's Julian Borger, describes some of the ways in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, and others tried to rein Trump in on foreign policy.

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Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump

How North Korea’s Dictator Scammed Trump

Donald Trump had a bad week. He went to West Point to make himself look like a strong leader but raised doubts about his health when he struggled drinking water and descending a ramp. His first Supreme Court appointee wrote the opinion in a case upholding gay and transgender rights.

The court also struck down Trump's effort to deport undocumented foreigners brought here as children. His former national security advisor wrote a book painting the world's most powerful person as an ignorant sleazebag who was guilty of the impeachment charges and more.

Trump had to reschedule a Tulsa rally planned for Juneteenth, but he insisted on holding it the following day — risking lives in a state suffering a surge of the coronavirus. New polls showed him trailing Joe Biden by landslide margins.

In any other week, it would be major news that the North Korean government blew up an office building that had been used for meetings with South Korean officials. Ordinarily, Americans might have taken note that, as The New York Times reported, the regime is threatening "to extinguish the fragile detente with a new cycle of bellicose actions and military provocations."

Attention would have been riveted by disclosure in Bolton's book that Trump's get-togethers with Kim Jong Un were not about eliminating North Korea's nuclear program but merely at making himself look good.

In reference to the first meeting, in Singapore, Bolton says Trump told him "he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press conference to declare victory, and then get out of town." Though Trump cared little about nukes, making sure that Kim received an Elton John CD "remained a high priority for several months."

Trump has been a failure in many areas, but nowhere else has there been a greater distance between what he claimed to achieve and what he actually did. In his telling, he averted the war that Barack Obama had been on the verge of initiating. "You would, right now, be in a nice, big, fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn't elected president," he claimed last year, in one of his hallucinatory episodes.

At the outset, it was Trump who sounded ready to launch an attack. In 2017, the Pyongyang regime carried out a successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. The president responded by declaring that if North Korea threatened us, "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." In a speech at the UN, he said, "Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime."

But soon Trump changed his tune. He dispatched CIA Director Mike Pompeo to North Korea, and soon he agreed to travel to Singapore to meet with Kim. He made this concession even though the CIA, according to NBC News, concluded that "North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, but it may be open to allowing a western burger chain to open a franchise in the country."

In June 2018, his first summit with Kim yielded a vague joint communique and Trump's agreement to suspend joint military exercises with South Korea. But he immediately tweeted, "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."

In fact, Kim never gave up a single nuclear weapon. What he did instead was manipulate Trump with flattery. "He wrote me beautiful letters," the president gushed in 2019. "We fell in love."

But their love affair has not kept Kim from expanding his nuclear arsenal. Nor has he closed any of the reactors that produce weapons fuel. North Korea has gone back to regular missile tests. Last month, Kim convened his military leaders to announce "new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country," according to the government.

In short, Trump held three grand summits with Kim, bragged about eliminating the nuclear threat, expressed his love for the dictator — and has gotten a big fat nothing. Concludes Bolton, "We're now nearly three years into the administration with no visible progress toward getting North Korea to make the strategic decision to stop pursuing deliverable nuclear weapons."

Trump is the political equivalent of the lonely guys who get scammed by dating websites promising to connect them with hot Russian women. The promises he got from his heartthrob didn't pan out. But hey — he'll always have those letters.

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.