Of media hotheads and Trump’s Syria blunder
Of media hotheads and Trump’s Syria blunder

If we can get cooler heads to prevail, we could use a discussion about President Trump’s late-breaking blunder, that of retreating from Syria and in fact the entire region.

Bad move – when the umpire is removed from the field. That’s when the thugs get to play it their way. 

Mr. Trump has had many plusses. Overseas, for Israel, most notably. But this is a minus…and the consequences, for the Kurds, are already unfolding, terribly.

For Israel, a message that it now stands alone as the good-guy powerhouse in the region.  

Trump’s equating the Arab/Israeli conflict to Turkey/Syria and the Kurds, as he did at Wednesday’s news conference, was unfortunate.  

No American was ever asked to fight and die for Israel. Ever. The Israelis fight their own battles. It is important to keep that straight.  

Trump’s Sunday surprise caught his supporters off-guard and places them on the spot. 

Trump and his voters have every right to feel hounded, hunted and besieged. It’s been three years of media torture. 

Small chance when he does right, which is plenty. No chance when he does wrong, which is now.

For Obama, it was love at first sight. They were all Democrats and they were all in it together. 

Journalism in America began its slow death when at The New York Times, Dean Baquet advised his reporters to ignore balance and neutrality, but write how they “feel.” 

So they did, and they all loved Obama during the Obamacare fiasco, and they all coveted Obama during the Iran Nuke Deal debacle.

No more was it about scrutiny and doing journalism the old-fashioned way.

No, it was how they “felt.” 

No attention was paid, and no calls for impeachment were made, when Obama shipped $150 Billion to an Iran regime that threated to annihilate both Israel and the United States.
Today, we call this news, and today they “feel” that President Trump is “a risk to our national security” and “a clear and present danger” for his phone call to Ukraine.

Did he offer military assistance to a foreign adversary? 

No. That brings us closer to Obama. 

For no attention was paid, and no calls for impeachment were made, when Obama shipped $150 Billion to an Iran regime that threated to annihilate both Israel and the United States. If that, plus another billion and a half sent over in laundered cash, wasn’t a risk to our national security, nothing is…and nothing, not a peep, was the response from the media establishment.

Neither Chuck Todd nor George Stephanopoulos were much bothered by so much aid being delivered to the world’s leading purveyor of terrorism. 

They were awfully calm about it, because those were the Obama years. These are the Trump years.

So send in the hot heads.

There is other way to describe it when on ABC-TV Todd grilled Sen. Ron Johnson and when on NBC-TV Stephanopoulos dunned Rep. Jim Jordan.

The Republican lawmakers, there to make the case for Trump and against the impeachment inquiry, never had a chance.  (Check out this book for the ultimate inside scoop on media bias.)

The anchormen were at a boiling point throughout the inquisition.

Had the media saved their best shot for a time like this, as to Syria, when Trump so truly errs, we’d know we have a media we can count on. Alas, not so.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His Holocaust to Montreal memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah” has been honored from page to screen at CANNES. His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com