In the world of politics, posturing, grandstanding, and rugged adherence to talking points often result in what could be labeled as “beating a dead horse.” But on Thursday, left-wing Wall Street Journal White House reporter Eli Stokols took things to an unprecedented level with a peculiar idea: execute a dead man.
On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Wall Street Journal, Stokols found himself so caught up in irrational bias against President Donald Trump that, in an effort to attack for the sake of attacking, he called upon the President to sentence deceased Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to execution.
Stokols was reacting to President Trump’s address of Tuesday's Lower Manhattan slaying of 8 pedestrians by Uzbeki Islamic terrorist Sayfullo Saipov. On November 1st, the President tweeted that Saipov “should get (the) death penalty.” This enraged Stokols, who attempted to call the President on his perceived hypocrisy over not demanding death for Paddock as well. Somehow, the news reporter had missed the news that Paddock had committed suicide the night of the atrocity.
For good measure, Stokols summoned the usual leftist charges of hatred and racism, taking the opportunity to bash Republicans for their “bloodthirst” and “ethnocentric nationalism.” He condemned the Right's support of capital punishment for a man who murdered eight innocent people.
The discussion was led by host Nicolle Wallace, and the general attitude of the left-wing panel was, of course, against the President, characterizing him as a tweeting gunslinger and questioning whether his public statements against the terrorist might interfere with Saipov’s prosecution. Curiously, the Left was silent when
Obama made statements vilifying individuals in criminal cases, even when the facts were unknown to him. But the panel was all too ready to criticize the President and his party for positions on what was clearly terrorism:
WALLACE: Eli, I guess I'm always surprised, and I probably shouldn't be anymore, but I'm always surprised when a new norm is obliterated. And I asked Jeremy Bash this question yesterday: Is this response to the attack a norm that was violated but that his supporters will love or is this one where he's actually jeopardized the case?
ELI STOKOLS: I think it's both. And I think, you know, when you look at what he's doing, there is a consistency in his response to these kind of situations, to terrorism when the terrorism appears to be carried out by somebody who’s from an Arab country, Muslim country, not from the United States. This is the rhetoric that we heard all throughout the campaign: the bloodthirst, the aggression, the retribution. Those are things that his supporters really like. Now that he's president, it is problematic, as Pete pointed out. The fact that these are subtle legalities basically tells you that these never once occurred to the President because he was, as Phil pointed out, just answering a question. And everything is done kind of rapid fire, in the moment, just read and react. That's all improvisational. But it does -- the unifying thread is the sort of broader politics of Donald Trump, the ethnocentric nationalism. He did not react this way when a white person shot dozens of people in Las Vegas. He did not come and say: well, we have to do an immediate policy change; we need to give this guy the death penalty.
The more the Left attacks the President irrationally, and the more they ignore the importance of promoting their own supposed virtues as opposed to baselessly denigrating Republicans, the less they will ingratiate themselves to voters. If they continue on this current path, Republicans will have no need to place the Democratic Party in their sites — like Stephen Paddock, it will have destroyed itself.
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