SECOND HAND NEWS

First they came for the spellchecker.  The new White House list of 78 terrorist attacks that the crooked media refused to cover has quite a few typographical errors.  In fact, the word “attacker” alone was misspelled (“attaker”) 22 times, or twice as often as the number of the terrorist attacks on the list that took place on American soil.  The sloppy composition of the list is the least problematic thing about it, but the fact that no one bothered to proofread it speaks volumes about the Bannon/Trump regime.

One thing is certain now.  We can forget the lessons of Watergate.  For the past forty years, it has been an article of faith in the press that it was the cover up, not the original mistake, which got politicians into trouble.  Admit your error, apologize, and move on. 

But like Pearl Harbor and September 11, the Bowling Green Massacre has changed everything.  Team Trump’s response to being caught in a lie is to lie more.  Even as twitter was mocking Kellyanne Conway for her imaginary tragedy, Donald Trump doubled down on the claim that many acts of terrorism are “not even being reported” by the very bad, no good, failing American media.  Sad! 

The next day, the White House released a list of 78 terrorist incidents, mostly overseas, as evidence for Trump’s claim.  In addition to its typos, the list was problematic in other ways.  For some reason, whoever compiled it threw Kellyanne Conway under the bus by leaving out the Bowling Green Massacre.  More importantly, they also left out white Christian terrorism (including school shootings and attacks on abortion clinics), attacks on reporters and the press worldwide, and also attacks on Jewish victims in Israel. 

But its omissions aside, many of the incidents on the list were in fact front page news in the American press.  That’s when reporters noticed that the White House was trying to move the goal posts – changing Trump’s “not even being reported,” which is demonstrably false, to “under-reported,” which is a totally subjective criterion. 

And the fact is, 75 of the 78 incidents were covered at some length by the American press (see the link below for video confirmation).  The three remaining incidents include one – an alleged rocket attack on an Egyptian airfield – for which the only references on Google are to its presence on the White House list.  Perhaps it has flown under the radar because it coincided with the Bowling Green Massacre.  There was another incident in which someone threw a Molotov cocktail at a mosque in Sweden, with no casualties.  And finally, in Chad, someone with a BB gun shot at police officers in front of an American embassy, also resulting in no casualties. 

And now you know … the rest of the story.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/donald-trump-says-u-s-media-ignored-these-78-terror-at-1792074596