Posted on 30 September 2020
Here’s Exhibit A for how shameless PBS looks in the fall campaign. On September 22, their series Frontline aired a two-hour documentary on the presidential election called “The Choice,” as they do every four years.
The quick review: Donald Trump is a vicious “killer” and bully. Joe Biden is “Obama’s trusted partner.”
It began with Trump’s hostile experts, like biographer Gwenda Blair. “Donald’s father’s overall message to his children was....compete, win, be a killer. Do what you have to to win.” Narrator Will Lyman added Trump “was determined to live up to his father’s ideal: Be a killer.”
Young Donald is sent to military school, where it was a “five-year lesson in how to be a bully.” Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher set the scene: “Donald Trump yelled at his classmates. He pushed them around. He even used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn't listen to him when he told them what to do....He became one of the student leaders who had a number of kids under him in the dormitories, and he ruled the dormitory life with an iron fist.”
The narrator summed up: “Inside the brutal world, Donald had found his place....With his father and mother by his side, Donald graduated. He'd become a killer, learned the power of bullying to get ahead, a method he’d carry into the future.”
Then it turned to Biden, and the tone changed entirely. “Joey Biden's crisis was stuttering.” We're told a cruel nun at his Catholic school mocked his stuttering. His sister Valerie touted how their mother went to the nun and said “if you ever, ever, ever do that again, I’m going to come back and I’m going to knock your bonnet right off your head. Do we understand each other?"
The narrator intoned: “Bullied, harassed, ridiculed, he was hell-bent on beating the stutter....He kept pushing—against the stutter, the bullies—and it paid off.”
All this overt pro-Democrat messaging was just in the first 15 minutes of the film. It did not improve.
Fast-forward through the biographies. After tugging heartstrings on all the tragic deaths in Biden’s family – losing the wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, his son Beau dying of cancer in 2015 – Trump was taunted with the Access Hollywood tape and talk of how deeply racist his family was.
Biden got a free pass on anything he ever did that would upset minorities, from opposition to busing in the 1970s to the 1994 crime bill. Democrat Bakari Sellers said “Joe Biden has the Obama halo; everybody knows that. That is the cleansing of Joe Biden and everything that may have happened.”
Former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery added: “Even if they don’t agree with him, they think he’s a good faith actor. That means a lot. To a community of people who have been betrayed and oppressed and tricked and lied to, someone who you can trust at their word, that goes a very long way.”
The concluding sermon came from another Washington Post reporter, Dan Balz: “Policy is not the choice that’s on the ballot this year. It is a choice of character. It is a choice of temperament. It is a choice of persona and personality. That’s always a factor in our presidential campaigns, but I don’t think it’s ever been as big a factor as it will be in November.”
Policy is not on the ballot?? Forget defunding the police, “Medicare for All,” the “Green New Deal,” or gun control. Don’t vote for the “killer.” Vote for the man with the “Obama halo.” This hustle is not subtle.