In a masterstroke of ill timing today, Hillary Clinton again denounced Donald Trump as an enabler of Muslim terrorism…just as bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was discovered sleeping in a bar in Linden, NJ.

From the NYTimes:

Mrs. Clinton moved to take control of the debate with a cutting attack on Mr. Trump on Monday: At a morning news conference inside an airport hangar in rainy Westchester, she urged Americans to show “courage and vigilance,” and not to demonize Muslims or Americans of foreign origin.

[…]

Mr. Trump, she said on Monday, had helped the Islamic State and others cast their attacks as part of a religious war between Islam and the West.

“They are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists,” Mrs. Clinton said, adding, “The kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

The anti-Trump “conservative” website The Federalist was more emphatic in its treatment of this morning’s airplane-hangar press conference. Under the title “Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump Is a Traitor, and These Attacks Are His Fault,” the editors included a key line left out of the Times account:

After multiple terrorist attacks launched across the U.S over the weekend, Hillary Clinton placed blame at the feet of the man she says is responsible for recruiting ISIS terrorists across the globe: Donald Trump. Then she accused him of treason, a capital crime that carries the penalty of death under federal law.

 

 

“Donald Trump is being used as a recruiting sergeant for ISIS,” Clinton said on Monday morning. “The kind of language and rhetoric Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

People who watch network television were able to see The Tonight Show last night. Current host Jimmy Fallon joked with Donald Trump and messed up his hair.

The rest of us saw snippets on the InterWebz, where we were treated to a huge Twitter storm of outrage at Fallon. Jimmy was damned for daring to treat this terrible person, this —racist, fascist, nazi, white supreemist, irredentist, orange-faced antedeluvianist—thing as though it were just another celebrity-pol to be kidded around with…the way Jack Paar knocked back with Dick Nixon in 1960.

Some of the tweets were too funny to be ill-tempered. Real Grade A comedy stuff turned up, imagining Hitler or Stalin on the couch, welcomed by Jimmy Fallon with routine, generic joviality. (“You killed 30 million people? That’s crazy! Josef Stalin, everybody!”) And some of the anti-Trump tweets were so over-the-top they should be jokes…

Presumably some were voicing serious, if hysterical, concern. And this concerns us much indeed. Because how will they handle their butthurt when Trump gets elected in November?

Whining on Twitter won’t do it. That would merely trivialize their agony. Perhaps they could go full Buddhist-monk, with gasoline and a Zippo in the middle of a street? That might work.

Here and there we stumbled across striving SJW journo-wannabes, or elderly journo-never-weres, manically shouting out to all parties that this was a disgrace, that you are disgraceful, that I’m gonna block you as soon as I finish my flame-war.

Such was the case with Michelangelo Signorile, a name you probably do not know, but who had 15 minutes of fame back in 1990 when he “outed” the freshly dead Malcolm Forbes. Needless to say, he did not base this scurrility on diaries, memoirs, or interviews with Mr Forbes. Signorile had…other…sources.

This sensationalism gave Signorile’s shoestring magazine a shot in the arm for a few months. Soon enough, though, Outweek succeeded in “outing” everybody and discovering that nobody really cared. Whereupon the rag folded. In the next quarter-century, Signorile was unable to move from this into serious journalism, although he still rumor-mongers on satellite radio and Twitter.

Signorile had no conceivable business with Fallon controversy except to denounce people with green-frog avis and “Deplorable” in their names. His technique was to bait to adversaries, then call them anti-gay when they talked back.

Donald Trump said Thursday morning that he was “really proud” of his role reducing Americans’ trust in media to a historic low.

—Today’s story in Business Insider.

Uh, well yeah, obviously. But is this a case of Trump…

A) Actually influencing the public POV through his public statements?
B) Becoming an object lesson in media distortion?
C) Corroborating what everyone already knew about the rigged press?

Undoubtedly it’s more B and C than the vague persuasion described by A. But inevitably this story is being spun as a tale of Trump misleading the iggerant through his attacks on the press. That’s how it’s presented here at BI, and that’s how the clickbait website The Daily Beast positions it.

Keith Olbermann, the TV sports commentator whose career tanked when he decided to become an angry political pundit instead, now has a “show,” or rather a kind of vlog, affiliated somehow with the men’s fashion magazine Gentleman’s Quarterly.

Confusingly named The Closer (same title as a 2005-2012 “police procedural” drama starring Kyra Sedgwick), the offering appears to be a low-budget retread of Olbermann’s old Countdown on MSNBC. That is, it’s another rant-fest from Keith. On Countdown he mainly filled out his slot with fist-pounding invective against Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly (“Bill-O”), whom Olbermann grandiosely imagined to be his opposite number. Grandiosely, that is, because Olbermann’s ratings were relatively miniscule.

Now Olbermann’s imagined rival is Donald J. Trump:

This time-server and token finally gets his comeuppance. They hack his email, find him calling Donald Trump a “national disgrace.” Not coincidentally, this same Colin (pronounced like the lower intestine) is the creature who advised Hillary Clinton on how to set up email accounts on secret servers.

You don’t need to be a Schadenfreude addict to find this whole story lip-smacking delectable.

Story in Time, the Colin Powell of newsmagazines.