News media love Trump Liar of the Union speech, more GOP propaganda about FBI

President Trump during his first -- and probably last -- State of the Union speech on Tuesday night (photo by Win McNamee via AP). 

A photo of Trump that was published after he was fired by NBC for calling Mexicans rapists and drug runners. Same tie, same lies as on Tuesday night.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J. 

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

I must be the only one who remembers when a South Carolina Republican shouted "You lie" as President Obama delivered a health care speech to Congress in 2009.

Where were the shouts of "liar" during President Trump's first State of the Union speech on Tuesday night -- or Liar of the Union speech, as I like to think of it?

Instead, I had to listen to upbeat coverage of the speech on the morning TV news, with only a minute or so devoted to a rebuttal from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass.

"It would be easy to dismiss the past year as chaos. Partisanship. Politics. But it's far bigger than that," he said, according to CNN. "This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us -- they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection."

Local coverage

The Page 1 headline in The Record of Woodland Park, my local daily newspaper, is puzzling, if not downright awkward:

"TRUMP TOUTS

OPTIMISTIC TONE"

One definition of "tout" is "attempt to sell." But can you try to sell an "optimistic tone" or should that have been:

"TRUMP ATTEMPTS

TO SELL OPTIMISM"

The sub-headline claims, "Speech advances infrastructure, immigration plans."

But no action  was taken on Tuesday night -- it was just a speech -- so "advances" is inaccurate.

Liar in Chief

After telling lies his entire life, does anyone really believe Trump -- con man, white supremacist, abuser of women and tax dodger -- was speaking the truth in his call for bipartisanship and unity?

"Trump offers same policies in new bipartisan packaging," was the headline over a Politico.com report.

Sounds just like media reports about Chris Christie, when he was governor of New Jersey and hailed as a "bipartisan compromiser" even as he executed one veto after another to keep Democrats in line. 

Fact Checker

Trump's claim that African-American unemployment "stands at the lowest rate ever recorded" is a total fabrication, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker:

"The African-American unemployment rate has been on a relatively steady decline since it hit a peak of 16.8 percent in March 2010.... "The rate had already fallen to 7.7 percent when Trump took the oath of office -- it is now 6.8 percent."

During the 2016 campaign, Trump claimed falsely that 58 percent of black youths were unemployed -- the actual figure was 19.2 percent, the newspaper said.

Secret memo

And the news media can't seem to get enough of the secret GOP memo about alleged investigative abuses at the FBI as part of the Russia probe.

Reminds me of all the time and space they devoted to the endless GOP lies about Hillary Clinton's emails -- stories that helped derail her campaign against Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

See: Media rewrite Christie history