US election: Donald Trump’s five lines of attack on Clinton, by Anthony Zurcher. This article by the BBC nakedly defends Clinton and attacks Trump over his speech, underlining the international nature of political correctness.
Of course, the BBC puts on a thin veneer of being factual and impartial, evaluating some of Trump’s “claims” with sections entitled “veracity” and “effectiveness”. But it is fully laden with PC spin. It offers many value judgements, all pro-Clinton and anti-Trump. All of Trump’s facts are called “accusations” and “claims” before being spun and dismissed. Presumably now that they have been dealt with, the PC media will not repeat them and just refer to them as “debunked accusations” or some such. Hard to believe that the BBC charter says it should be non-political and impartial, but I suppose there has been a lot of “progress” since those older days.
Words used to describe Trump: bare-knuckles, inflammatory, prone to occasional exaggerations and misrepresentations, brash, braggadocious, struggling to find his footing, the party’s presumptive nominee traditionally takes a higher road, inflate the numbers (even when as even the article makes clear, he did not), diminish the rigorousness, rhetoric he used cost him dearly among minority voters. All rather negative, wouldn’t you say?
Words used to describe Clinton (by the BBC author, rather than quotes from Trump): credentials, been in politics a long time, her status as the first female major-party nominee sets her apart. All rather positive.
The article finds a factual error in Trump’s speech, on its most insignificant point: the $56k jewellery gift from the Sultan of Brunei was turned over the the US government so it cannot be a bribe. This mistake gets high billing, while the bribery charges of millions of dollars are ignored except for offering the weakest of defenses, that “there is no evidence of a quid pro quo” (what evidence would there be, apart from what has happened in public since and was referred to by Trump?) and by downplaying them as “possible inappropriate relations with wealthy foreign officials and businesses.” The PC crew reading the article nod knowingly that Trump is loose with the facts, and just kind of forget about the major corruption charges.
Trump’s source of some quotes and information is the book Clinton Cash, twice dismissed by the BBC author as written by a “conservative commentator.” In PC-speak, labeling something “conservative” is to say it is wrong, false, and in bad taste, an unfact — code the PC crew pick up on and use among themselves regularly. They frequently dismiss an inconvenient fact merely by saying it’s bearer is “conservative” — no more need be said.
