I’ve got some bad news to deliver, and you might want to sit down for this: Journalists are upset again.
That’s so out of character, right? So what are they seething about this time? Apparently, the alliance between Kari Lake and Glenn Youngkin has them seeing red, especially as Lake looks to be in setup to defeat Karen Hobbs in Arizona. Oh, excuse me, I mean Katie Hobbs.
The Washington Post put out a hand-wringing attempt at chastizing Youngkin on Thursday morning, accusing him of straddling the “Big Lie divide.”
RICHMOND — As Gov. Glenn Youngkin crisscrosses the nation, stumping for Republicans and raising his own profile ahead of a possible 2024 presidential bid, he is straddling the GOP’s “big lie” divide.
He went to Georgia on Tuesday for fellow Republican and governor Brian Kemp, who resisted pressure from President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election results. Next month, he’s sl ated to boost election-denying Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Given the shift in polling towards the GOP in the last few weeks, I’m pretty convinced that this obsession with supposed “election denial” isn’t moving any needles anymore, if it ever did. There’s a reason for that. Namely, that it’s completely arbitrary.
Can we just start by asking why the press continues to appropriate a term popularized by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s top propagandist? Isn’t there some irony in that? But I digress, there are literally hundreds of Democrats in national and state offices that questioned the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election.
The former president was called a Russian plant, accused of winning a “stolen” election rigged by Vladimir Putin. But that doesn’t get the “election denier” treatment from the press because that would mean actually holding some kind of consistent standard. It would also mean conceding some political power in doing so, and we all know that’s never going to happen. So instead, we get this ridiculous purity test that only applies to one side of the aisle in regards to a single election while Hillary Clinton is still out there claiming she was cheated to mass plaudits from the press.
As to what the Post’s proof text is for their accusations against Youngkin, they cite none other than January 6th conspiracy theorist Liz Cheney.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chairwoman of the House Jan. 6 committee, praised Youngkin over the weekend for “doing a good job” as governor and not buying into “the toxin of Donald Trump.” But she blasted his support for Lake while ruminating on the dangers posed by election deniers and more mainstream figures willing to countenance their lies.
“Partisanship has to have a limit. There’s got to be an end,” she said in an onstage interview Saturday at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, a celebrated political gabfest where Youngkin appeared Friday morning.
There is no one with less credibility on this issue given Cheney’s refusal to call out Democrat election denial. In fact, she praises those who objected to the certification of Trump’s election. That the Post the post would use here to form the premise of their piece completely discredits it. Cheney is irrelevant and holds no influence in the GOP. What she thinks might as well be what the random hobo on the corner thinks.
Regardless, Youngkin is a guy who understands the stakes. He’s also a man of his word, having promised to campaign for GOP gubernatorial candidates. That he isn’t bowing to the pressure and threats of being labeled an accomplice to the “Big Lie” is a testament to the fact that he knows what time it is. Yeah, he’s not Ron DeSantis when it comes to fire and vigor, but not everyone is going to be that.
I commend him for his alliance with Lake and his focus on things that really matter because, in November, people aren’t going to be deciding their vote based on what someone thought about the 2020 election. This is a free country, and no one is required to prostrate before Joe Biden’s election. They also aren’t required to bow to the media mob attempting to set arbitrary, hypocritical standards of disqualification they themselves don’t adhere to. In the end, voters care about the economy, the border, and the culture, not CNN’s partisan obsession.