Say What is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: Washington and much of the nation breathlessly await the Mueller report. The special counsel at some point soon will submit the report, and then it's up to Attorney General William Barr to decide in what form to release it to the public. After two years of investigations by Mueller's partisan-Democrat team, with no finding of Trump-Russia collusion, Democrats seem to be gearing up for a major disappointment. To fill the gap, Democrats are launching multiple congressional investigations of their own on Trump. There was this surprising assessment of a "no collusion" finding by Terry Moran answering a question from Diane Sawyer, not on some conservative news outlet but on ABC.
Diane Sawyer: How big a deal is it if they don't find collusion for the president?
Terry Moran: Huge. He's cleared …. The central and most serious question in this investigation, the reason Robert Mueller started it, is: "Did the current president of the United States assist the Kremlin in an attack on our democracy?" If Mueller, after two years, comes back and says, "I don't have the evidence to support that charge," that's a reckoning. That's a reckoning for progressives and Democrats that hoped Mueller would essentially erase the 2016 election. It's a reckoning for the media. It's a reckoning around the country if, in fact, after all this time there was no collusion.
Tim: So if the Mueller report, as expected, comes up empty on Russian collusion, just how much appetite will ordinary Americans have for more and more investigations of Trump -- and impeachment - by the Democrat-run House? Speaker Nancy Pelosi already said this week that she's not looking to impeach.
Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi: If the Mueller report comes back with information, I don't think we should impeach a president for political reasons, and I don't think we should not impeach the president for political reasons, but you have to be ironclad in terms of your facts and see where that takes us.
Tim: There are, however, at least 60 members of the House who do favor impeachment, even as they admit they don't yet have the evidence to do it.
As the field of Democratic presidential candidates continues to grow like a weed, we got the new hot progressive property, the boy wonder, the white male version of Barack Obama or perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, throwing his hat into the ring this week. Beto O'Rourke, who's not a Hispanic but plays one in politics, has completed his extensive naval gazing and decided to enter the fray as the 15th candidate to try to take down President Trump.
Beto O'Rourke: Amy and I are happy to share with you that I'm running to serve you as the next president of the United States of America. The only way for us to live up to the promise of America is to give it our all and to give it for all of us. We are truly, now more than ever, the last great hope of Earth. At this moment of maximum peril and maximum potential, let's show ourselves and those who will succeed us in this great country just who we are and what we can do.
Tim: Like most of these announcements, Beto says nothing of substance, but early signs are that he'll leverage his charming Obama-like personality and fundraising ability, which landed him more than $70 million in contributions for his Senate campaign against Ted Cruz in Texas, where he lost a close race.
But there's so much pressure on these Democrats to toe the politically correct progressive line that they'll undoubtedly run into big trouble once the general election against Trump rolls around. Listen to a candidate who's supposed to be one of the most plainspoken, independent-minded of the bunch, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. That's his real name. Listen to him repeatedly dodge what once was an easy question from Joe Scarborough on MSNBC.
Joe Scarborough: Would you call yourself a proud capitalist?
John Hickenlooper: Oh, I don't know. Again, the labels, I'm not sure any of them fit.
Scarborough: I'll break it down even more. Do you consider yourself a capitalist?
Hickenlooper: Well, again, the labels .... I am a small business person, so part of the system that you would call capitalist, I get it.
Scarborough: Do you consider yourself a capitalist and does capitalism work?
Hickenlooper: Well, I think I don't look at myself as a label.
Tim: See, in today's Democratic Party, you're not allowed even to admit you're a capitalist.
Meanwhile, President Trump decided to ground the Boeing 737 Max jets this week after two crashes overseas by those planes in the last several weeks, prompting this interesting analysis from Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon on Fox News.
Matthew Continetti: Trump is a security president. It's forgotten now, but terrorism and the security of the American people were a paramount issue in 2016. I think it's an underrated reason why he was elected that year. He's taken pride in his flight, in the flight record ... the relatively safe record, very good safety record in the first few years of his presidency. He doesn't want to risk that. He wants to maintain his image of being the security president. That's why he made this decision.
Tim: President Trump, a security president. It'll be interesting to see if Trump runs with that theme in his reelection campaign.
Now, we hear an awful lot about fake news these days, but an even bigger problem may be the supposed solution for it: media curating by so-called fact-checkers with dubious intentions. This all started with an announcement by President Obama two years ago. Media analyst Mickey Huff said on Sharyl Attkisson's online show Full Measure that the cure might well be worse than the disease.
Barack Obama: We're going to have to rebuild within this wild, wild west of information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to.
Mickey Huff: The whole fighting of fake news has become a Trojan horse to propel other agendas. In the name of telling us what is fake news, we'll also be seeing more censorship, whether, again, it's algorithmically, through bots, through filter bubbles, whether it's outsourcing to fact-checkers like Snopes or Politifact.
Sharyl Attkisson: But do you suspect there are special interests behind some of these efforts that are actually trying to shape opinion and do the opposite of what they say they're trying to do?
Mickey Huff: Absolutely. In the name of fighting fake news is purposely suppressing certain views, certain narratives, certain sources.
Tim: With a stunning percentage of people getting their news from Facebook, this puts tens of millions of people at the mercy of those who decide what is fake news and what is not. You know one thing beyond all else: The fact-checkers used by Facebook and the other media giants, Google and Twitter, are certainly not conservatives.
We close with something you thought you would never see or hear. A scandal broke this week about college admissions bought and paid for by wealthy elitists who spend big money for their kids to cheat their way into elite colleges like Harvard and Georgetown. The kids either pretend to be athletes or their parents hire smart guns to take the kids’ SAT tests. Arguably the most deranged anti-Trumpist in the media, CNN's Don Lemon, said this:
Don Lemon: This is an America that can be deeply unfair, where hard work doesn't necessarily pay off, where if you have money, you can buy anything because just about everything is for sale, including integrity for sale, where a whole lot of people have real good reason to believe the system is rigged against them. Listen. This is what Donald Trump tapped into. In a lot of ways, guess what? He was right.
Tim: Don Lemon saying Trump was right? What's next? Perhaps the Earth spinning off its axis.
