Barack Obama Discusses Fake News With Rolling Stone

So, Barack freakin Hussein Obama has started his farewell tour. As part of it he gave an interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. In it he touched on why Donald Trump won and what Democrats did wrong. As he’s done in the past, Obama complained that, from his point of view, there are too many news sources. This is not a new complaint. Clearly the idea of people having unapproved ideas bothers him.

The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It’s making people exaggerate or say what’s most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs.

Wait, wait. “Most vicious of insults or lies?” Rolling Stone?

A federal court jury decided Friday that a Rolling Stone journalist defamed a former University of Virginia associate dean in a 2014 magazine article about sexual assault on campus that included a debunked account of a fraternity gang rape.

The 10 member jury concluded that the Rolling Stone journalist was responsible for defamation, with actual malice, in the case brought by Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. administrator who oversaw sexual violence cases at the time of the article’s publication. The jury also found the magazine and its publisher responsible for defaming Eramo.

The $7.5 million lawsuit centered on the 9,000-word article written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely titled “A Rape on Campus.” The article appeared online in late Nov. 2014 and on newsstands in the magazine’s December 2014 issue.

I think I just threw out my irony joint.

Naturally, any Democrat discussing Trump’s win is going to hit the tired old trope of “fake news.” As best I can tell, “fake news” is anything that deviates from the accepted progressive norms.

And part of the challenge, though, that we do have, and this is something that I’ve been chewing on for a while now, is that there is a cohort of working-class white voters that voted for me in sizable numbers, but that we’ve had trouble getting to vote for Democrats in midterm elections. In this election, [they] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments. That part of the critique of the Democratic Party is accurate. We spend a lot of time focused on international policy and national policy and less time being on the ground. And when we’re on the ground, we do well. This is why I won Iowa.

If I have to hear this guy talk about “Fox News in every [fill in a venue here]” I swear I will gag. Fox News has a smaller viewership than any of the three network news operations. When you combine ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC, Fox is dwarfed. And besides, who goes to a bar to watch the news? Is that what Democrats do?

You can talk all you want to about Donald Trump’s delusions (and there is quite a bit to talk about there) but he can’t hold a candle to the rich fantasy life led by Barack Obama. The Democrats lost for any number of reasons. They have engaged in a balkanization of America and their campaigns are based upon setting classes and races against one another. They have shown they hold traditional American values in contempt. The have demonstrated, time and again, that they would readily sacrifice Americans on the altar of multiculturalism rather than take a stance against terrorism. All of those could be overcome had they not nominated a 70-year-old, evil, personally unpleasant wealthy kleptocrat.

In three of the last four elections, the nation rejected Obama, his party, and all its works. But blaming the news is easier than actually fixing the problems.

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