Chris Stigall Column: Have At 'Em, Mr. President

PHILADELPHIA (CBS)--Oh no you don't, news media folks.  There will be no victimhood tolerated.  You can call Trump's tweets whatever you want.  You can be upset undercover activists are making your once private conversations public.  You can retract and apologize for fake news stories all you'd like.  You can even bellyache about your treatment during White House press briefings.

But never forget – you did this to yourselves, media folk. Crying about the way you're being treated now won't elicit tears from any of us.  We don't care about you and we don't trust you.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the assassination attempt of Republican members of Congress by a deranged and politically active Bernie Sanders voter.  Remember that?  That was a real thing.  That happened.  There's a high-ranking House Republican still convalescing from extensive surgery because of bullet wounds.  Untold numbers of Congress people would be dead today if not for Capitol Police.  Think of that.  But it's as though it never happened, because…TRUMP!

At the time, for a moment, there was much discussion of the tone of our politics.  I said then that such discussion was one hundred percent disingenuous when coming from the left.  Within days I was proven correct.

Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren – not even two weeks after their Republican colleagues were nearly slaughtered by one of their voters – were back to the rhetoric they claimed we needed to temper just days before.

Republicans were again guilty of proposing Obamacare cuts deemed "blood money," and were knowingly going to "kill hundreds of thousands of Americans."  That reflection on our rhetoric, it turns out, wasn't sincere.  Shocker.

Did anyone in mainstream news media remind these soulless jerks it was one of their voters, inspired by their rhetoric, who tried to murder their Republican counterparts?  Nope.  Back to business as usual because Democrats, like their media pals, are more invested in defeating the man in the White House than in rationality.

But the deranged hate from Democrats is only half the story.  The deranged hate train of mainstream news media outlets has been humming right along on a parallel track.  But that train seems to have derailed, specifically at CNN.

They've had to fire two employees who called President Trump vulgar names and held a bloody, beheaded Trump in a photo shoot.  They dismissed three more employees for manufacturing a story about a member of Trump's transition team doing secret business with Russian investors.  The story was a total lie and they attempted to simply erase it from their website.  But once the subject of the story threatened to sue, CNN was forced to publicly apologize.

Of course we can never forget CNN was also the network that claimed it had inside knowledge former FBI Director James Comey was going to contradict Trump's suggestion Comey told him three times he wasn't under investigation.

Comey didn't contradict it – he confirmed Trump's account.  And my all-time favorite story - hacked emails proved former DNC head and CNN contributor Donna Brazille secretly fed questions to the Hillary Clinton campaign ahead of broadcasts to give Mrs. Clinton some lead time to craft answers last year.

Then there's the undercover camerawork of James O'Keefe's "Project Vertitas" exposing both a CNN producer and well know liberal pundit Van Jones.  Both candidly confessed the Trump/Russia collusion story was a "nothingburger."  Further, the producer admits they were ordered to continue to make hay of the fiction because it meant big ratings for the network, even though they all knew there was nothing to it.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has launched a broadside at the New York Times suing for defamation.  The unhinged newspaper saw fit to allow an editorial to go to print after the attempted Republican assassination of House members suggesting Palin was tangentially to blame.

Palin, the editorial falsely claimed "incited" the wounding of Gabby Giffords and the deaths of six others because of a political ad she funded featuring crosshairs marking targeted Democrat districts.  In fact, not only was the gunman obsessed with Giffords he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and wasn't the least bit political.

Quite the opposite of the gunman of just a few weeks ago who was not only politically active, but even visited Bernie Sanders office weeks before he tried to murder Republicans.  Still, the Times tried to somehow blame Palin for the "climate" of today.

If there's a legal defense fund for Palin, could someone let me know?  I'll donate.

Fast forward to today.  CNN's crying the White House is bullying them for calling out their misdeeds in public.  President Trump tweeted about MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski 's sanity, IQ, and plastic surgery and the media is again manning their battle stations to take on even more perceived "bullying."

A CNN panel just finished debating whether or not Trump and the White House were placing journalists in danger because all of his zombie supporters might take up arms and try to harm them for picking on their leader, or something.

The fact is nobody respects them enough to want to harm them or wring their hands on their behalves.  Takes too much energy.  It's a bipartisan disdain, mistrust, and disgust the country has for these outlets.  Check voter opinion polls on news media in this country.  It's worse than Congress.

They're not journalists, they're activists.  And for political activists, these outlets feed their insatiable hunger for Trump scandal – but that doesn't make it news.

For the record, no I wouldn't tweet or speak as Trump has were I president, but I didn't win the presidency.  He did.  And he prefers to give it to media as good as he gets it.  I suppose I'm supposed to say this is beneath us, or the dignity of the office, or let's rise above this, etc…but I won't.

I won't because I don't respect them.  They've stood by while my fellow voters as well as those we've elected have been called everything from bigots to deplorables to killers simply because of our politics.  Most mainstream media have done nothing but provide the rhetoric an unchallenged platform.

So have at it President Trump.  I may not cheer it, but I'll look the other way and sleep just fine.