In case you’ve missed out on the latest wingnut rage tantrum, it seems that some of our more prominent institutions of journalism wrote about the appearance of Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean maniac legacy hire Kim Jong-un, at the Winter Olympics, and did so without providing an 8,000-word digression concerning forced-labor camps. Some of the coverage compared Kim’s smile with the performance of Mike Pence, the very large block of cheese currently serving as vice president of the United States, who sat there like a big block of cheese when the combined Korean Olympic team—surely, one of the most promising developments on that benighted peninsula in years—marched in the opening ceremonies. (CNN took immediate heat for a headline that said Kim was “stealing the show.”)

Surely, we can all agree that forced labor camps are very bad things, and also that being represented on the world stage by a doltish theocrat of whom even Indiana was sick and tired is rather like handing the wheel of the QE2 to Gilligan.

Nevertheless, the usual suspects have gone bananas—abetted, I am sorry to say, on the electric Twitter machine by several members of the elite political press.

The National Review, America’s longest continuously published journal of white supremacy, was particularly piqued. Of course, the article takes on faith that all the articles that so enraged the author “fawned” over North Korea. There are no examples provided of said “fawning” except for one tweet from a guy from The Federalist and some snark from BuzzFeed. The author, David French, of course, ran for president for about 11 minutes back in 2016, and, judging from some of the prose herein, looks in the mirror every morning and sees himself wearing a toga. From the NR:

The extraordinarily high stakes of America’s confrontation with North Korea demands sober judgment and cool-headed analysis. It demands the best from the American media. The Trump administration’s actions towards the Kim regime may well be the most consequential actions the president takes — more important (depending on the outcomes) than judges, taxes, or DACA. Yet how can we have confidence in news judgments and diplomatic analysis when this is what a news weekend can look like?

Get a grip, dude. You’re starting to make Victor Davis Diocletian Vespasian Hanson sound like Emma Goldman.

Thoughtful members of the media lament the decline in public trust. They rightly point to bad-faith partisan attacks as a partial cause. But they can never, ever stop looking in the mirror. If they want to know why countless millions of Americans don’t trust their reporting, these last two days could serve as Exhibit A to the collective American complaint.

But even Mr. French can’t outdo the tantrum thrown by Ben Domenech at the aforementioned Federalist. In a frenzied outburst that matches anything he wrote on behalf of the notably humane Malaysian government, Domenech tells his mailing list that, wait for it, the media hates “America,” as defined by the suckers who pay for this motley brand of wisdom:

But we cannot say these things when the American media, time and again, illustrates its utter hatred for the nation and its people in those newspapers and on television. Having judged the American project kaput after the election of Donald Trump, they are now stooping to the level of defending the North Koreans – perhaps the most brutal and heinous regime in the world today – thanks to some side-eye from its minister of propaganda, the sister of Kim Jong Un. If the headlines are to be believed, “North Korea heading for diplomacy gold medal at Olympics” is the story American media want to tell about this moment. I wish this was an exaggeration. Witness this story from CNN today, with its dripping credulousness in attacking Mike Pence with a story sourced entirely to a diplomatic source close to the North Korean regime.

Even if you give Pence a pass for meeting with the defectors and with Otto Warmbier’s father, which I do, because that’s also what vice presidents do and the senior diplomatic source can pound sand if he doesn’t like it, Pence still behaved like a dolt in the stadium because Mike Pence is a dolt and everybody from South Bend to French Lick knows it. What does alarm me is the fact that, clearly, if the two Koreas somehow managed a peaceful modus vivendi on their own, some people in the United States would devote themselves night and day to screwing that up. Certainly, the president* wouldn’t be able to keep his tiny fingers out of that pie.

In any event, nobody “fawned over” the Kim regime. In fact, nobody would have noticed that CNN story that kicked everything off if it hadn’t been used for rube-ginning purposes by the right-wing media consortium. I am not going to let these idiots ruin the Olympics for me. I still have short-track to watch and something called mass-start speed skating, which sounds like a blast.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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