Dan Rather: Trump's Behavior 'Is Not Normal'

Newsmax ^ | 12/5/17 | Dennis Van Tine/AP

[x1stcav]

President Donald Trump’s behavior is out of the ordinary for a president, according to veteran news reporter Dan Rather Monday night on the TBS talk show "Conan."

"A lot of young people, well, people of all ages don’t know, from one day to the next, what he’s going to do, what he’s going to say," host Conan O’Brien said.

"It is important for us to remember this is not normal," Rather said.

He noted that some presidents have not liked the press, but no president has behaved as Trump has toward the press. "We’ve never had one that steadily, out of his own mouth, waged such an unrelenting campaign against the press," he said.

[SunkenCiv]

Gosh, I guess taking an adversial position works both ways, eh disgraced Partisan Media Shill Dan? But broadcasting a late-hit FALSE story that had already been debunked years earlier doesn't indicate hostility or an unrelenting attack? Thanks x1stcav.

[SunkenCiv]

Speaking of normality, and Conan...

Caution: Handler vids are bound to be in bad taste, but in this one she makes a tortured, mentally twisted comparison of President Trump with an ape, and subservient to Putin, on the grounds that a false allegation of a Russian prostitute urinating on someone or something related to Trump (I guess) -- and that's followed by actual vid of Chelsea swimming, near the end of a dock, as Jason Biggs urinates on her. There's also vid snips from an appearance of hers on Conan's show where she jokes and laughs about having had an abortion when she was 16, and how otherwise she'd have a biracial 20 year old child. Note that the title is, alas, merely hyperbole.

[snip] Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty... High ammonia content in this one. As "Muh Russia" evolves from Trump collusion to Trump apparently didn't do anything to holy sh*t it was actually the DNC that colluded with Russia, I humbly bring you this forgotten amber-hued gem from a few years back. [/snip]

[AmusedBystander]

Einstein wasn’t “normal” either, Dan.

[Jimmy Valentine]

Dan Rather trying to crawl back to relevance. Fake but accurate you putz.

[justa-hairyape]

To a lying scumbag like Dan Rather, a president who actually tries to implement his campaign promises, is abnormal.

[loveliberty2]

"'We’ve never had one that steadily, out of his own mouth, waged such an unrelenting campaign against the press,' he said."

Oh, really???

Well, of course, Dan Rather probably never read that great advocate for a free press who, nevertheless, had these things to say about dishonest and partisan so-called journalists:

The mainstream press, as they are called, along with Progressive politicians, may have passed the point described by Thomas Jefferson in the following words:

"Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty, by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. This increases the difficulties ten fold; and those who pursue these methods, get themselves so involved at length, that they can turn no way but their infamy becomes more exposed. It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." - See "Letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 814-815.

". . . he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him." - Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson's views on the importance of a free press are well known. Nevertheless, Jefferson was well aware of the dark under belly of a segment of the press which might set itself up, as he called it, "to serve the ministers" of a "despotic government."

Note that in the last of the following quotations on the subject, Jefferson noted, "But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood," he declared, "I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth."

"[A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

"[I have seen] repeated instances of the publication of what has not been intended for the public eye, and the malignity with which political enemies torture every sentence from me into meanings imagined by their own wickedness only... Not fearing these political bull-dogs, I yet avoid putting myself in the way of being baited by them, and do not wish to volunteer away that portion of tranquillity, which a firm execution of my duties will permit me to enjoy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:226

"Conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared should be known, I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment, which was to prove that an administration, conducting itself with integrity and common understanding, cannot be battered down even by the falsehoods of a licentious press, and consequently still less by the press as restrained within the legal and wholesome limits of truth. This experiment was wanting for the world to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government. I have never, therefore, even contradicted the thousands of calumnies so industriously propagated against myself. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807. ME 11:155

[Albion Wilde]

No leader is “normal.” A norm is what is usually done. Leaders see a better way and lead people towards it.