I think the divisions became really noticeable back with Newt Gingrich and the rise of conservative media. Trump capitalized on it and encouraged it for his own benefit though. I will never believe you on deficit reduction being a principal. Trump had 2 years of party control and the gop passed tax cuts for the wealthy using budget reconciliation. This was during a time of economic growth and your party increased debt. And all the lies and downplaying of Covid that Trump did is a matter of record. Dr. Birx and Fauci now freed are singing like birds too. More death, division and debt all under Trump
Ah. You mean when conservative media emerged, and offered an alternative to the liberal bias of the mainstream media.
The acrimony I'm sure goes back to before even Kennedy vs Nixon in 1960. But that was the first stolen election, and it was clear the media gushed over JFK and protected him during all the years he was president, despite, for example, he was too high on painkiller drugs for his back injuries to function as president if needed. Or his many sexual liasons, one of which was a Nazi spy in 1942 that JFK shared secrets in bed with, recorded by the FBI. If JFK's father at the time were not the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, JFK would have been thrown out of the navy or courtmartialed. JFK also slept with high class call girls sent to him by the Mafia, and two who were communist spies. And of course, Marilyn Monroe, and allegedly, a young Nancy Pelosi.
The media further sided against Nixon in 1968-1974, even before he did anything wrong in Watergate.
The media ridiculed and clearly sided against Gerald Ford. Chevy Chase a few years ago admitted that he's a Democrat, and his buffoonish portrayal of Ford as a clumsy oaf with a band-aid on his forehead was calculated to undermine Ford in the 1976 election.
The media hated Reagan, they ridiculed and undermined him at every turn. As quoted by Bernard Goldberg in his book BIAS, the public overwhelmingly voted for Reagan in 1984, but every White House corrrespondent 10 of 10 at the time, for papers and networks, voted for Mondale. How do you think that affected election coverage?
They hated G.H. W. Bush.
Needless to say, they hated and sided heavily against George W. Bush. "Nazi ! Warmonger! War Criminal! Illegal war!"
They loved McCain while he was a thorn in W. Bush's side. But as soon as he was the nominee in 2008, they made it their holy mission to destroy him. "Racist! Warmonger!"
They hated Romney. "Racist! White supremacist! Entitled Blue Blood! Out of touch! "
I see a pattern here....
Then they pounced on Trump with the same labels when he ran. Trump is not uniquely intolerable to the Democrat/Left, he is just the latest Republican who had to be destroyed so their guy could win. And they want to destroy him so he can't run again, as he has clearly projected he will. And the liberal media will go after whoever the next Republican is with equal viciousness, no matter who it is. At this point I'd guess Josh Hawley would be the frontrunner in 2024 if not for Trump, or maybe as Trump's VP nominee.
So... around the time of G.H.W. Bush and Clinton's emergence in 1992, conservative media in the form of talk radio emerged. Rush Limbaugh was the first giant. In one of his ads he had a liberal on the phone with him saying "Why don't you give liberals equal time?" and Limbaugh responded "I AM EQUAL TIME !" Making the point that the liberal media had a stranglehold on all other media but talk radio, and Limbaugh's 3 hours a day were a drop of conservative rebuttal in a sea of liberal bias dominating all other media. I first became aware of Limbaugh's show while I was still a college student in the late 1980's. There was a Carvel ice cream shop owner I was friends with, and he always had Limbaugh's radio show on when I came in his store to chat. For a while, Limbaugh had a 30-minute TV show in 1993-1994 that I loved. It was very funny, similar commentry style as Glenn Beck did in 2008, before he moved to Fox News.
But the political division became increasingly harsh throughout the 1980's. And despite my remaining a conservative while watching news, the liberal bias was noticeably deceitful. While the nation was strongly Republican,the media was clearly to the left of the public.
For me, the match that really sparked partisan divisiveness was the Robert Bork nomination.
Then, a few years later in 1991 the Clarence Thomas supreme court nomination.
Then in 1992, the news media, particularly CNN were gushing over the Clinton campaign, and CNN and other networks would talk over and not really allow G.H.W. Bush's message to be heard unfiltered, either on the campaign trail, or at the RNC convention. It was clear and infuriating bias, and a new intrusion over actual news.
Then once elected and in the White House, the Clintons played a vicious hardball I'd never seen before. Travelgate, for example, where the Clintons pushed out career persons who non-partisanly served for decades under administrations of both parties. But Hillary slandered and fired them, not just fired but DESTROYED them, just so she could give their cushy jobs to friends of hers. There were hearings where Senate and House members of both parties testified as character witnesses on behalf of those fired. it was mean and disgusting.
Likewise, "Filegate" where the Clintons were gathering files on Republican House and Senate members so they could intimidate and blackmail them into silence, and into not opposing the Democrats' agenda.
A few years later, Fox news came along in 1997, and I never heard of it until we were all posting on the DC message boards, circa 2000-2003. But I continued watching PBS News Hour instead, from 1981-2008, at which point there was a clear transformation at PBS, and it became just yet another gushing propaganda arm for Barack Obama's campaign. For a while I would watch PBS, CNN and then Fox at different hours. Then increasingly I felt lied to by the selective omission on PBS, and it was just CNN and FOX. Then a few years later, CNN got increasingly partisan-Left, and it was shortly after Lou Dobbs was leveraged out that I largely stopped watching CNN at all.
So that's where I see the divisiveness starting. And I actually didn't realize how much an increasing level of opinion was rising on Fox until I started watching OAN around 2018, which I see as a more conservative version of HLN, Headline News. What made Fox News good from 2008 till recently was that you not only had conservative opinion, but they had good liberal opinions, and they kind of factchecked each other in a dialogue on issues discussed.
But since after 2013, I've noticed Fox going more the rout of CNN where while there is factual news on Fox, it is increasingly opinion and crosstalk. Hannity and Colmes was good and balanced, but Hannity by himself is an echo chaamber. And even the liberal pundits on Fox are mostly talking points machines that just repeat their spin and narrative, devoid of actual facts. Alan Colmes and Judith Miller, and Kirsten Powers were liberals, but when they cited supporting facts, I agreed with their points about 20% of the time, or at least respected their perspective. But now they have clowns like Chris Hahn, and Richard Goodstein, and Richard Fowler, who are just partisan bulldogs making their same partisan talking points over and over, without any real information.
And really, I don't have any more interest in just listening to a Republican/Trump echo chamber either. I miss when all these stations got into the meat of it, actual facts, and not just angry shouting and talking points. I see that as kind of beginning on MSNBC, where they were the lightning rod of hyper-partisan liberal opinion. And then I read an article around 2014 that MSNBC was getting a larger market-share than CNN, and CNN hired their current program director to basically go more "opinion" and less news, until CNN became even more rancorous and hyperpartisan than MSNBC !
And I think Fox deviated from the "fair and balanced" that made them number one in the ratings for 20 years. Drifting to more shouting and opinion, less fact. And again, it was watching OAN starting around 2018 that made me see the contrast to what Fox had been before, to what Fox has become. And I became aware in 2017-2018 that while Republicans were overwhelmingly supportive of Trump, the pundit opinions on Fox News, particularly on Cavuto and Brett Baier and (while he was still there) Sheppard Smith, had a ratio of never-Trumpers, "Republicans" who don't support Trump, way disproportionate to tthe ratio of Republicans in the rest of the U.S.
I think I first began to dip in enthusiasm for Fox when Glenn Beck was cancelled, which was a very informative show, almost like a college class with all the information provided, and its replacement with "The Five", which is more of a personality-driven shouting match type show. Not that it doesn't sometimes have information when I occasionally watch, but definitely not the same as what preceded it. I used to DVD timer-record Beck to watch when I got home.
So I mostly watch OAN, Newsmax and Fox, not necessarily in that order, and for a sampling of the other side, some occasional CNN or MSNBC. And the opinionated rancor on CNN makes me more conscious of the potentially rancorous opinion being fed to me on the networks I prefer. But I find OAN to have the most actual news, objective facts reported, vs. opinion. And it bugs me that all these channels package opinion as "news". The opinion used to be more clearly separated from the news, or at the very least, they were more subtle about injecting it.
I think the divisions became really noticeable back with Newt Gingrich and the rise of conservative media.
Newt Gingrich was not the beginning of the rancor, he was a reaction to the outrages of the Democrat-Left from 1987-1994. And his "Gingrich Revolution" (decisively winning both houses of congress by big margins for the first time since the 1940's) showed that the American public was as fed up with the Democrats as the Republican leadership was. That's a case for the intolerable behavior and backlash against the Democrats, for infuriating over-reach and deception.
Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 on being a "moderate" and not raising taxes, and then immediately raised taxes on people down to 30,000 a year, not just "the rich" as he campaigned. He was politically crippled in the very next election in 1994.
Again, not a case of Republican "divisiveness", but of Republicans having to aggressively respond to the deception, vicious tactics and over-reach of the Clintons and other Dem leaders.
[qquote=M E M]I will never believe you on deficit reduction being a principal. Trump had 2 years of party control and the gop passed tax cuts for the wealthy using budget reconciliation. This was during a time of economic growth and your party increased debt.[/quote]
Again: the increased debt is partially or completely because your party extorted more liberal spending for every budget Trump submitted.
As I've given as an example before, Trump wanted $700 billion to rebuild the military that Obama underfunded and destroyed for 8 years. 50% of our military planes when not combat ready or able to fly when Trump came in. But to allow Trump to rebuild the military, Democrats extorted another 900 billion in liberal spending, a total of $1.6 trillion to allow rebuilding of our military. So when you blame Trump... it was really the Democrats who pushed for all the spending.
And all the lies and downplaying of Covid that Trump did is a matter of record. Dr. Birx and Fauci now freed are singing like birds too. More death, division and debt all under Trump
Are you really unable to see how partisan and incendiary what you're saying is?
As with the Covid-19 propaganda you're pushing, there is absolutely nothing you try to sell as "Trump lies" about Covid-19 that wasn't first said by Anthony Fauci. What Trump said, he said with Fauci as the authority who told him these things.
1) In Jan, Feb and early March 2020, Fauci said that Covid was just a problem in China, people don't need to worry about it here in the U.S., he was wrong. What Trump said, he said on the advice of Fauci and Redfield.
2) Fauci said we don't need to wear surgical masks, they're not effective, that you're stupid if you do. That turned out to be a deliberate lie from Fauci, to conserve a short supply of masks for hospitals who needed them most. But it was a lie. And then when Fauci, I think in April, suddenly completely flipped the narrative and said we all ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO wear a mask, trust was broken and a lot of people didn't believe him or comply.
3) Fauci on both Fox and CNN in Jan -Feb 2020 said that these outbreaks generally are brief, or don't survive well in Summer weather, and it will likely quickly die out. It will "just go away." But Trump is demonized for repeating what Fauci advised him, and what Fauci publicly said himself.
4) On the Covid-19 test, and the availability date of it, were promised and delayed many times by the CDC. That was also Fauci's promise to Trump that was not fulfilled, and it turned out that CDC ha infected a whole lab with Covid-19 and couldn't use it to develop a test kit, and hid that fact from Trump, saying "soon, soon...". When Trump was finally made aware of the CDC's error, he enlisted the private sector to bypass the incompetent CDC, and they built and mass-produced a test kit in a few weeks DESPITE the incompetence of the CDC and Fauci at NIH. But again, you irrationally exalt Fauci as a hero and demonize Trump, for things that were Fauci's fault, not Trump's.
5) Fauci and Redfield(CDC) advised Trump that a ban on travel was not necessary. Fortunately, Trump ignored them and put in place a halt to all travel from China on Jan 31 2020, and a month later from Europe. A month or two later on 60 Minutes, Fauci said that the travel ban was the single best strategic move in the Covid fight, that gave the nation and our hospitals time to prepare. Biden called the suspension of travel "xenophobic and racist". As did Pelosi in California, and Deblasio and Cuomo in New York, who encouraged people to mingle with Chinese travelers at street festivals, that turned out to be super-spreader events, with New York city having the highest infection rate and deaths OF ANY REGION ON THE PLANET ! Did these Democrats "kill people", M E M?
Did Fauci?
No, only Trump, right M E M?
6) Fauci another time on CNN in early March 2020, took a phone call from someone in their 60's who had booked a cruise. The man asked Fauci if under the circumstances he should cancel his trip? Fauci said no, go ahead on your trip, enjoy yourself. A week later, two different cruise ships had become super-spreaders, with passengers trapped on board, and no nation wanting to let them disembark in their country. JUST A WEEK AFTER after Fauci gave his sage advice, a cruise ship was proven to be about the worst place you could be during the pandemic. Without Fauci's advice, how many people would have not gone on those cruise ships? How many of ended up dying? Did Fauci kill them?
No, only Trump.
All of those things Fauci said, you don't have a problem with. But when Trump said the EXACT SAME THINGS, because he was ADVISED by Fauci these were the case.. you hold up Fauci as a man of medical science who can't be questioned, Oooh how dare you question him, but say Trump LIED TO US AND KILLED THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, for saying the exact same thing !
Well, which is it? Both are right, or both are wrong. And Trump is not a doctor or scientist, he took a while to find out Fauci and Redfield were unreliable. That's when Deborah Birx and Scott Atlas were hired.
Fauci further became a darling of CNN and undermined Trump in the months leading up to the election, saying it was impossible to develop a vaccine in less than a year, it can't be done, and either said or implied that Trump was a liar for creating that hope.
Well guess what?
The vaccine was ready 5 days after the election. And for political reasons, probably ready long before, but withheld to damage Trump in the election. But Fauci was wrong again.
So you have a clear double-standard, where you demonize Trump, while simultaneously giving a free pass to Fauci and these others I mentioned, for publicly stating these same statements.
