It is a measure of the anti-Trump media’s stupidity and malpractice that the phrase “breaking news” now elicits eye rolls. The media’s “breaking news” about Trump is rarely breaking or news. It is usually recycled and old — some stale piece of information, relating to a practice both parties long ago adopted, that is sensationalized and dished up as novel. Into this category falls much of its breathless “Trump-Russia” coverage, including its all-hands-on-deck stories about Donald Trump Jr.

“It is called opposition research,” said President Trump on Thursday at a press conference in Paris in defense of his son.

From the hair-on-fire hysterics of the Democrats and their patrons in the press, one would think they had never taken a meeting with a foreigner or searched for dirt on a political rival. Of course, they have — and never more so than during their quest to torpedo Trump’s candidacy. What was the “Steele dossier” fiasco but a Dem/media attempt to collude with Brits to stop Trump?

Had BuzzFeed not released the contents of that transparently ridiculous and bogus dossier, the self-appointed ruling class would still be talking about it. Lightweights in the press, straining to sound deep, will recite such quotes as “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed,” even as their coverage rests upon the biggest lie of all: the assertion of imaginary Trump-Russia criminal collusion based on nothing more than false, fragmentary leads that came from their own collusion with foreign powers.

Just a few months ago, the sunshine patriots of the press were extolling John Brennan and Susan Rice for spying on Americans on the basis of “tips” that they had received from Estonia, Sweden, and Great Britain, foreign powers that were gunning for Trump’s defeat. Recall the Pravda-like headline Maggie Haberman of the New York Times used to whitewash the spying of Susan Rice: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”

Take pretty much any headline the media has used to sanitize the political espionage of the Dems against Trump, substitute Donald Trump Jr.’s name into it, and you will see that the smears against him and his father carry all the evidentiary weight of a Soviet show trial.

“Donald Trump Jr. Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides” — the only reason you don’t see that headline is because the ruling class hates the Trumps and loves the Dems.

Beneath all the bluster of the Dem-media complex lies a bald double standard, which amounts to saying to Trump: You must never do what we do all the time!

Childishly, the Democrats and the reporters in their pocket make the daily demand that Trump unilaterally disarm. To which Trump responds sensibly: Why should I? That would just hand the Dem-media complex victory. All of its whining about his “unconventional” behavior is just another way of its saying that he is the first Republican since Reagan not to submit to their double standards. They remain shocked that a Republican President would have the audacity to fight back without two arms tied behind his back, which was the customarily feckless style of cowed Republicans for years.

One can only laugh at the staggering hypocrisy of the ruling class’s bleating. Take John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who voted for the Soviet-controlled Gus Hall at the height of the Cold War and who served as a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood during his tenure as CIA director. The other day, Brennan, feeding into the media’s narrative of Trump as “treasonous,” declared Trump’s pro forma greeting of Putin at the G20 meeting (that it was an “honor” to meet him) unworthy of an American President. Imagine if Ronald Reagan had refused to shake the hands of the Soviet leaders. Brennan would have been the first to denounce Reagan as an enemy of “peace” and “dialogue.”

The Dem-media complex has gone from demanding dialogue with foreign enemies of America to forbidding it, from showering the Castros and Soviets in praise to drowning Putin in denunciations. A phony patriotism has once again become, in the words of Samuel Johnson, the last refuge of scoundrels.