Little to no good is accomplished by the WSJ editorial board's refutations of Trump's Big Lie when those are balanced by the board's serial propagations of less-big lies, such as the magically wondrous effects of discredited supply-sideism or the autocratic malevolence of Democratic strivings to alleviate monstrously high child-care costs confronting financially strapped American families.
Indeed, in mathematical and jurisprudential fact, take all of the Journal's lesser lies, add 'em up, and you get a great big package deal of the editorial board's lesser lies balancing out the scale of Trump's Big Lie.
The Journal's political perjury now harbors yet another, rather weighty element of mendacious propagandizing: Recent revelations about the Steele dossier's "phoniness," writes editorial board member Holman Jenkins, have destroyed the believability of Trump's Russian collusion — a cloak-and-dagger partnership story which the writer characterizes as a "farrago" of the Fourth Estate's "intellectual collapse."
In short, there was never anything to see here, folks; the story was merely a leftist hoax, and we should just forget the whole collusion thing.
Jenkins singles out CNN as a particularly vicious perpetrator of journalistic deceit. "In an act of institutional cowardice," he writes, the network "ends its whitewash" of an article "by winkingly saying President Trump’s performance at the Helsinki summit led 'many to wonder if Trump was compromised after all.' Not only is this anachronistic since the press’s collusion obsession was still in full flower at the time. It’s a falsification of reality and history. Mr. Trump’s ad-libbed performance left much to be desired but what the press wanted from him it would not have gotten under any president. The world does not want to see the leaders of two nuclear powers engaged in heated animus on a public stage."
There, it is Jenkins creating a "falsification of reality and history." What led to proper suspicion of Trump being compromised was not at all his refusal to engage in "heated animus" with Putin. It was his siding with the Russian dictator over America's own intelligence agencies — a remarkably subversive act no other U.S. president would ever have entertained.
Continues Jenkins: "Nor would any president pleasure his partisan, lying critics by portraying his own election as illegitimate, which is what many wanted from Mr. Trump (who of course knew collusion was a lie)." Sure, of course Trump knew that.
Thus the Journal is but part of the right's clanging propaganda machine that's been jamming itself with this preposterous protest: The Steele revelations have shattered all published notions of any Trump-Russian collusion. Even usually saner, peripheral cogs such as Andrew Sullivan have joined the press-bashing parade, in which collusion implicitly morphs into nothingness.
This demands an extraordinary blindness, something akin to America's hard leftists having decided in '39 that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was a good and logical thing.
The right's mission: We must no longer see the June 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Trump's top henchmen and Russian "lobbyists"; the Senate Intelligence Committee's damning, bipartisan report, about which, lawfareblog.com wrote, "Whether one describes [Trump & Co.'s] activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it"; and Special Counsel Bob Mueller's written findings, which almost certainly would have been more incriminating and dispositive had Trump & co. not committed, as Mueller observed, multiple obstructions of justice, which fatally inhibited the special counsel's grounds to declare collusion's reality.
The Big Lie so familiar to all is a sick, unexampled, immensely corrosive assault on the American political tradition. That lie, however, has a sister companion of equivalent destructive force: The massive and forever amassing bag of lesser big lies, hustled from Bannonlike subterraneans to even the flagship "conservative" outlet of the Wall Street Journal.