WND: Don't Do (To Trump) As We Did (To Obama)

WorldNetDaily has a lengthy track record of "conveniently forgetful news," complaining that others were treating Donald Trump the same way it treated Barack Obama.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 4/10/2017

“Conveniently forgetful news” can be found every day in every big “progressive” news outlet.

It takes the form of applying different standards to those who share one’s own ideological disposition.

You’ve seen it: Barack Obama did much that was “conveniently forgotten,” but when Donald Trump does the same thing it’s treated like a violation of the Constitution.

It’s so pervasive it would be impossible to chronicle – like “fake news.”

As with "fake news," Farah is complaining about something in which he and his own website regularly engage.

ConWebWatch has already documented two examples: WND complained about others likening Donald Trump to Nazis despite it spending years making Obama-Nazi comparisons, and it rushed to argue that Trump's election was the result of divine intervention after years likening Obama to the literal Antichrist and mocking those ascribing messianic qualities to Obama.

Unsurprisingly, Farah led the way on this blatant hypocrisy in his Dec. 16 column:

Let’s be honest and realistic about what is taking place in America today – about one month before the new duly elected president is to be sworn into office.

We’re in the throes of a coup, a junta, an effort to derail the constitutional election process by hook or crook, a dishonest, by-any-means-necessary, banana-republic-style power play, unlike anything we’ve seen in the traditions of American politics in 240 years.

Do I have it about right?

Would you agree?

[...]

There’s an unprecedented, active political campaign to turn Electoral College representatives sworn to Trump away from him. Why? Not because the vote was rigged, not because the election system was hacked, not because he won the votes fraudulently, but simply because they don’t really like him. Is this kind of behavior in the spirit of America’s proud tradition of peaceful transitions of power? Of course not.

Unprecedented? Has Farah forgotten his own big lobbying effort in 2008 to try to get the Electoral College not to vote for Obama, in which WND coordinated the sending of more than 3,600 letters to electors begging them to exercise their "sworn duty" to find out whether Obama was born in the U.S.?

Farah unironically continued:

The Big Media that were in the tank for Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign is not giving up, either. Instead, they are whipping up hysteria about unproven, unsubstantiated, sourceless, “fake news” stories about a fantasy conspiracy by Russia, and now specifically Vladimir Putin, to hack the Democratic National Committee and release embarrassing emails through WikiLeaks.

"Unproven, unsubstantiated, sourceless"? There's more proof of Russian meddling into the election process than there ever was that Obama's birth certificate is a forgery. WND is trying to pretend differently, of course.

Undaunted, Farah kept writing:

The disappointed supporters of Hillary Clinton and the strong opponents of Donald Trump continue to be whipped up into a frenzy that is profoundly dangerous to the peaceful transition of power. The goal seems to be continuing unrest, chaos, civil strife, permanent disenchantment – all supported by a tacit Hillary Clinton and an active Democratic Party political establishment characterizing the Russian hacking fantasy as “bigger than Watergate, bigger than 9/11.” Excuse me? If this is not conspiracy mongering and “fake news,” what truly is? Where is the evidence? What laws were broken? Who has been indicted? And why the Democrats’ sudden outrage about alleged foreign involvement in an election when, in the past, they have courted such involvement and pushed U.S. policies to involve the government in the elections of other nations?

But isn't whipping up the opposition, trying to interfere with the peaceful transition of power and manufacturing "fake news" in the form of the birther conspiracy exactly what Farah and WND were trying to do eight years ago?

Farah concluded, again unironically:

They will never give up. They will never relent. They will never accept Donald Trump as president. They will never admit they were beaten fair and square.

Because their standard is the very un-American notion that the ends justify the means.

Substitute Trump's name for Obama's, and Farah is talking about himself and his operation. The original #NotMyPresident guy, Farah wrote in a 2014 column: "Obama has never been my president. I have steadfastly refused to acknowledge him as such. He is undeserving of the honorific. To this day, I am unconvinced he is even eligible for office."

And the end -- getting Obama out of office by hook or crook, by any means necessary -- has always justified the means for Farah and WND. You could extend that back to 2000, when WND published a series of dubiously sourced articles with the intent of keeping Al Gore from winning the presidency. WND cheered how that succeeded -- but it fought a seven-year court battle with a Tennessee car dealer the stories had falsely claimed was a "suspected drug dealer." Just before the case was set to go to trial, WND abruptly settled out of court for terms it chose to hide and a public apology to the man for libeling him.

Farah is effectively complaining that Trump's critics are acting like he does toward Obama. Such hypocrisy. Such "conveniently forgetful news."

Not their president

Farah's hypocritical complaint about people who didn't accept Trump as president was not the only such lament at WND:

• A Nov. 13 "news" article quoting far-right radio host Michael Savage advocating for the revival of the House Un-American Activities Committee expresses concern that "there is already a concerted effort to deny the legitimacy of Trump’s election, with 'Not My President' serving as a popular slogan for left-wing groups around the country."
• Barbara Simpson's Nov. 13 column berates the "idiots ... in the streets" protesting Trump's election and "screaming that he is not their president," adding: "Just for a moment, imagine what the reaction of the media would have been if conservatives reacted this way when Barack Obama was elected. Of course, that never happened, nor would it."
• A Jan. 23 column by dubious historian David Barton cited "4 reasons 'Trump is not my president' claim is foolish." He claimed that those making the claim were deficient in education on "American history, government, Constitution and truth," and that such a claim "establishes personal opinion as the ultimate measure of right and wrong – that truth is whatever I believe or declare it to be. ... There is no alternate reality. None."

None of these articles mentioned Farah's refusal to accept Obama as his president. Conveniently forgetful!

Impeachment talk

Joe Kovacs wrote in a Nov. 28 WND article:

Donald Trump has not even been inaugurated into office yet, but radio host Rush Limbaugh is predicting a concerted effort by Democrats to impeach him from the presidency.

“I don’t have any doubt that there’s going to be a Democrat effort to impeach Trump,” Limbaugh said on his national broadcast Monday.

And even without any high crimes or misdemeanors committed by the president-elect, Limbaugh said opponents of the Republican will choose another route to push for his ouster.

“I think at the very least, the Democrats are gonna put voter fraud on their list of particulars for impeaching Trump,” he explained.

“They’re already beginning now to establish the evidentiary chain, and one of the elements of this is going to be that he’s illegitimate, that he really didn’t win.”

This complaint dates back even farther, to an April 2016 column by Farah: "Yet before Donald Trump even gets the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, there are already forces in the Washington establishment – including some Republicans – talking about impeachment! ... Who’s talking about impeachment more than six months prior to the election and months ahead of the convention that will nominate a Republican candidate?"

In May 2015 (!), WND's Cheryl Chumley touted a petition demanding the impeachment of Hillary Clinton even before the election for alleged actions as secretary of state -- a full three years after she vacated that post -- because "congressional precedent dictates that all elected officials remain subject to impeachment and disqualification from holding office even after resignation." This was just a month after she had announced her candidacy for president.

On top of that, WND's Jerome Corsi was touting just a couple days before the November election how "If Hillary Clinton wins the election Tuesday, a prominent Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee says there will be an immediate move to impeach her before she can even be sworn into office Jan. 20."

And let's not forget that just a year and a half after Obama was inaugurated, WND published a laughable, falsehood-ridden "Case for Impeachment" of Obama packed with bogus birther claims.

If WND didn't have double standards, it wouldn't have any standards at all.

Prayers against Trump vs. prayers against Obama

An anonymous WorldNetDaily writer was in full pro-Trump -- and anti-Muslim -- mode in a Dec. 18 article:

While the Council on American-Islamic Relations likes to bill itself as a Muslim “civil-rights organization,” it downplays its direct ties to the terrorist group Hamas, its lineage to the Muslim Brotherhood and its extremist history that includes dozens of its executives, board members’ and staffers’ indictments, convictions and prison sentences for terror-related crimes.

But sometimes CAIR leadership lets its guard down.

That’s what happened, apparently, in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, right after the election of Donald Trump as president became clear.

Hussam Ayloush, the long-time director of CAIR-Los Angeles, Tweeted out the following message:

“Ok, repeat after me:
“Al-Shaab yureed isqat al-nizaam.
“(Arab Spring chant)”

The second line in Arabic translates to “The people want to bring down the regime.”

“In other words, Ayloush unambiguously and directly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government,” observes scholar Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum.

The "threat" here is rather laughable when you consider WND's entire editorial policy for the previous eight years was centered on calling for the overthrow of Obama. And it's done worse.

In November 2009, WND editor Joseph Farah began one of his many, many anti-Obama columns with a segment of Psalm 109: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office."

Now, Farah probably wants you think that's a benign excerpt -- a 2011 WND article mocked the idea that the psalm could be considered a threat to Obama -- but as we noted, a full reading of Psalm 109 continues:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

May his descendants be cut off, their names blotted out from the next generation.

May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD; may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.

May their sins always remain before the LORD, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

In other words, not benign. Farah clearly was wishing Obama a very severe sort of ill will, if not his death, by invoking that psalm.

Trump-Nazi double standard won't die

ConWebWatch's original roundup of WND's flip-flop on Hitler comparisons came in a Jan. 25 article by Paul Bremmer:

From the left come the cries – Donald Trump is the new Hitler! His “America first” slogan has Nazi undertones! He hates Hispanics, Muslims and gays as much as Hitler hated Jews!

But Anita Dittman lived through the Holocaust as a Jewish girl in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, and on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, she has a message for those who think Trump is the American Hitler.

“When they say he is another Hitler, they are crazy,” Dittman told WND in a phone interview. “If he was another Hitler, he’d be shooting people that riot, and they wouldn’t have the freedom to riot. If anybody was against things in Nazi times, they would ship them off to the ovens, as we called the camps. There was no freedom.”

What Bremmer failed to tell his readers: None of those things applied to President Obama either, yet Dittman was not shy about likening Obama to Hitler.

As ConWebWatch documented, WND publicized Dittman's book "Trapped in Hitler's Hell," which it published in 2014, by touting how she thought Obama reminded her of Hitler, claiming that "Liberals’ blind idolization of Obama mirrored Germany’s hypnotic fascination with Hitler" as did "Obama’s empty rhetoric that energized his followers."

Now that's a better description of Trump and his followers than Obama -- witness WND managing editor David Kupelian's blind loyalty to him -- yet she curiously doesn't see the resemblence. Perhaps Dittman is motivated by something else with her Hitler-comparison flip-flop.

But since Bremmer is in marketing and not in news, he can't be counted on to tell us.

As an unintentionally ironic counterpart, Scott Lively wrote a Jan. 3 WND column headlined "OBAMA'S HITLERIAN DEPARTURE," in which he claimed that Obama's purported "vindictive strategy" to "make the Executive Branch unusable to President-elect Trump" reflects "similar egomaniacal errors of judgment to Hitler’s. Like Obama, Hitler presumed himself to be a great strategic genius. ... Like Hitler, Obama’s bad decisions invariably lose territory for his team: and each new bruise to his self-image requires a greater need for revenge, further clouding his judgment."

And, thus, WND's cycle of "conveniently forgetful news" continues.